Phyteuma - Rheum (excluding Primula)

Phyteuma sp. £3 / £3.50
Lovely fine leaved Campanula relative with round heads of deep blue flowers. Great for rock garden, trough or well drained front of border.

Phyteuma spicatum £3 / £3.75
Quite different, with a dense cylindrical spike of creamy flowers on upright 60cm stems. A rare Wealden native - my father knew it in his youth and referred to it as the 'Pride of Sussex'.

Pimpinella major 'Rosea' £3 / £3.50
Here, however, it's the clean pink flowers which are memorable. 1m or so in flower, but delicate. Easy.

Pinellia pedatisecta £3 / £3.75
Pretty summer growing Asiatic aroid. Slender soft greeny yellow spathes to 30cm in early summer. Not a dangerous bulbil maker! Shade.

Plectranthus excisus £3 / £4
Forget the look of the tender species, and think of this as a hardy Coleus. The leaves are interesting - some gremlin has bitten the tip off each and replaced it with one that's too small. Dies down completely in winter.

Polemonium 'Hannah Billcliffe' £3 / £4
Notably large flowers, starting lilac and ageing to a pale pinkish, bicolored effect.

Polemonium 'Lambrook Mauve' AGM £3 / £4
Mauve flowers over an exceptionally long season in spring and summer. Tough, compact, slightly spreading, up to 50cm tall and not prone to mildew. This is a plant which is common for all the right reasons.

Polemonium reptans 'Stairway to Heaven' £3.25 / £4.50
Cream variegated leaves purple tinted when young, and blue flowered. Apparently disease free! So good we had to swallow our old fashioned propagators' pride and buy in some plugs, since it is protected by the dreaded Plant Breeders' Rights.

Polemonium reptans 'Virginia White' £3 / £3.75
Pure white, and spring flowering. Remove flowering stems as they go over to encourage repeating. Not for very dry sites.

Polemonium 'Sonia's Bluebell' £3 / £4
One of the most distinctive and sought after of the many hybrid polemoniums. Elegant, rather nodding, cup shaped flowers in clear blue. It's the colour of the Scottish bluebell (harebell to us southerners) rather than the English Scilla. Less prone to mildew than many. Few.

Polygonatum cirrhifolium £3 / £3.50
Whorls of delicate leaves and nodding little lilac bells on slender stems to 45cm. Shoots erupt from creeping rhizomes so late in the spring you fear something's wrong, and flower within a fortnight. For a humusy soil in some shade.

Polygonatum x hybridum AGM £3 / £4
Another example of a plant which is common for the best reasons. This hybrid is the usual Solomon's Seal of gardens, in this clone quickly making a dense, almost weed-proof patch of elegantly arching flowering stems with all the grace of the species. About 60cm tall. No berries, unfortunately. For a rich, moist soil, best in light shade.

Polygonatum odoratum 'Flore Pleno' AGM £3.25 / £3.75
Classic Solomon's Seal, with interesting double flowers. 30cm here. It bulks up beautifully in a rich moist soil.

Polygonatum aff. roseum £3.25 / £3.75
A rarely seen miniature, with wiry 10cm stems and small leaves. The flowers are pinkish and nodding: the translucent red berries are a joy. Collected on Kanchenjunga years ago, and probably not roseum itself.

Polygonatum sibiricum DJHC 600 £3.50 / £4
Dan Hinckley collected seed from a plant in Sichuan, which had blue fruits, narrow leaves up to 12cm long, and which reached 3.9m in height through the lower branches of a larch. With us, the flowers are brown. These are divisions of one of the seedlings he raised. Quite how to make it grow this tall remains to be seen.

Polypodium australe 'Richard Kayse' £4 / £5
OK, this one needs some explanation. Start with the basic polypody fern frond. Now deeply divide the pinnae to give a much more lacy effect - this is the well known, well loved 'Cambricum', the Welsh Polypody. It was first found by one Richard Kayse near Cardiff in the 17th century. Other similar forms were subsequently found, and all have passed as 'Cambricum'. This rare form was recollected in the late 20th century from the type locality, and is presumed to be the original clone. We picked this out, quite naively, from Martin Rickard's erstwhile National Collection of the genus, as an especially attractive 'Cambricum' - it looks particularly neat, flatter and less raggedy.

Polystichum acrostichoides £3 / £4
The Christmas Fern of the American north east has distinctive narrow, coarsely lobed, rather upright fronds. Useful for cutting in winter. Moister shade.

Polystichum setiferum 'Pulcherrimum Bevis' AGM £3.50 / £4.50
We'll be straight with you about about this: not everyone is, and some perhaps don't much care. You probably know the old classic, which commanded a big price from nurseries; you may have greened with envy at the way the Savill Garden could plant them, almost casually, by the dozen, to great effect. Without resorting to technicalities, the frond is very elegant, nicely tapering, with well spaced pinnae. It produces offests, but not very freely, so the crowns get big and uncrowded, and the price stayed high. It's been tissue cultured, which is why you see it all over the place at ordinary prices now. It does not look quite right. Partly this is because the plants are small when you get them, partly it's because they have lots of little crowns, crowded together, which over time you might want to separate - we've started doing this for you on these. But still, I think it's an open question whether they will look exactly like the original in the end (we do have old, pre-TC stock for comparison but not (yet) for sale). They do, however, look extremely similar, and they make very nice plants. These plants are from tissue culture. So now you know (maybe).

Primula (see SEPARATE PAGE)

Pulmonaria 'Benediction' £3 / £4
We've broken our 'no Pulmonarias cos nobody buys them' rule already. 'Benediction' is not only so very good - a rich true blue with nice round spots, it also remains quite hard to obtain.

Pulsatilla pratensis £3.25 / £3.75
This is a very beautiful plant, with large, semi-nodding dark, dark purple flowers and the usual silky seed heads. 30cm tall. Originating from seed collected in Bulgaria getting on for 20 years ago, t's the only pulsatilla we grow, so it comes true from seed. I don't have the right volume of Flora Europaea to hand, so can't tell you the subspecies yet, but it is truly wonderful.

Ranunculus acris 'Flore Pleno' £3 / £4
The fully double Meadow Buttercup is a safe, easy perennial for the more or less sunny, not too dry border. Few.

Ranunculus extorris 'Flore Pleno' £3.50
A freak for freaks. One of those tiny Japanese oddities. A very small, narrow leaved plant of the sceleratus persuasion, completely dormant in summer, with lots of very small, completely double yellow flowers, often with a reddy brown flush, the petals quite narrow and strap like. Joe Sharman, its previous UK custodian, claims to have given up on it as ungrowable, which passes the baton on to us, since we had a piece from him some years ago. Definitely growable in a small pot of peaty compost, if you respect its growing cycle and keep slugs off it. We're tempted to put one on the AGS showbench, just to give all those Dionysias a laugh.

Ranunculus ficaria cultivars (all £2.75)
Three choice double varieties of the lesser celandine.
'Elan' Pale yellow petals, regular double.

'Ken Aslet' double white, grey backed petals, regular.

'Ragamuffin' A seriously weird mutant, a full double in which the 'petals' are thick and leafy in texture, yellow and dark green. Strangely attractive.

and two nice singles:
'Jake Perry' Pale lemon, grey backed flowers contrast well with black-purple tinted leaves. Very telling when caught by a ray of early spring sunshine. Wendy 'Bosvigo' Perry's selection.

'Witchampton' Shirley Forwood's excellent silver leaved  from Cranborne Chase.

Ranunculus repens 'Cats Eyes' £3 / £3.75
The impossibly invasive creeping buttercup in a beautiful form with brown tinted leaves, marked with pale blotches.

Ranunculus repens 'Snowdrift' £3 / £3.50
This time very heavily white-variegated. Shyer flowering, less vigorous, but even so…

Reineckea carnea £3 / £4
Good tough evergreen, herbaceous ground cover for shade. Sombre pink flowers in early summer (sometimes autumn too).

Rheum kialense £3 / £3.50
Big needn't be best in the rhubarb world. This dinky species rarely gets above 40cm in height, is always pretty, but I love it best just before the flowers open in spring: the inflorescences look like white sausages dotted with red. Sun, reasonable drainage: and don't put it in a crumble.