Polemonium - Ranunculus (excluding Primula)

Polemonium foliosissimum 'Cottage Cream' £5
Tall, self-supporting creamy white variety. Very tall says Sarah. Entirely self-supporting say I, being suspicious of sticks. We're both right.
Polemonium 'Hannah Billcliffe' £5
Notably large flowers, starting lilac and ageing to a pale pinkish, giving a bicolored effect.
Polemonium 'Lambrook Mauve' AGM £5
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 'Northern Lights' £4.50
Short (30cm), with nice clear blue flowers
Polemonium reptans 'Stairway to Heaven' £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' £4.50
Pure white, and spring flowering. Remove flowering stems as they go over to encourage repeating. Not for very dry sites.
Polemonium 'Sonia's Bluebell' £5
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 £4
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 feared something was wrong, and flower within a fortnight. For a humusy soil in some shade.
Polygonatum x hybridum AGM £4.50
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 kingianum yellow-flowered £10
Long greenish-yellow flowers, ageing properly yellow, hang in the axils of brown-tinted leaves. It will climb (well, scramble) given the opportunity. Not very hardy. A very special thing. The name is extremely dubious. What's new…
Polygonatum odoratum £4.50
A particularly good form of this very variable species, which comes into flower very soon after emerging, before the stems are fully extended. The leaves are inclined upwards, showing their rather glaucous backs. Less than 30cm tall, and setting blue-black berries quite freely.
Polygonatum odoratum 'Flore Pleno' AGM £4.50
Classic Solomon's Seal, with interesting double flowers. 30cm here. It bulks up beautifully in a rich moist soil.
Polygonatum aff. sibiricum DJHC 600 £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, but the ends of the leaves twist round as if they want to help it cling to other plants
Polygonatum sp. £4
A rarely seen miniature, with wiry 10cm stems and small leaves. The flowers are pinkish and nodding: the translucent red berries are a joy. Previously listed as aff. roseum - Aaron Floden says it's closer to prattii, but not actually that species.
Polygonatum sp. Og 94047 £5
A Chinese plant, collected by Ogisu as a Disporum, but everything about the flower and the rhizome, as well as its general look, say it's a small, freely running Polygonatum. Greeny yellow tubular flowers, flared at the mouth, hang in pairs under the arching 20cm stems. Most loveable, and seized by lovers of convallariaceous things at plant fairs this spring.
Polypodium cambricum 'Pulcherrimum Addison' £6
One of the nicest mutant polypodies (there are hundreds, and we only want the nicest ones). The fronds are bipinnate, i.e. divided once more than normal, have quite a neat, substantial look and tend to be held quite upright. The young fronds are curved in at the edges. Very distinctive. Found on Whitbarrow, a massive lump of limestone above Morecambe Bay, in 1861.
Polypodium cambricum 'Richard Kayse' £5
Bipinnate, but much less so, and flat as anything, giving a lovely lacy effect. First found near Cardiff in the 17th Century and recollected in the late 20th century from the type locality, and is presumed to be the original clone. One of the first we grew, having picked it out, quite naively, from Martin Rickard's erstwhile National Collection of the genus, without knowing its rarity and the great price it normally attracts (we learned that the hard way before we left).
Polypodium cambricum 'Prestonii' £8
This time the pinnae are lacerated, but not very deeply, are rather broad and overlap quite a bit. It's beautiful and very distinct from all the others we list. Came into cultivation by way of a nasty little bit of eco-vandalism by one of the old-time fern collectors, but all we can do now is cherish both the plant and the remaining limestone pavements of north-west England.
Polypodium cambricum 'Falcatum O'Kelly' £6
Compared with all the others we list, the pinnae are almost entire, but curve round towards the frond apex, giving a narrow, forward-swept  outline to the arching fronds, which move in the wind more than others. Distinct and lovely. Originated in the Burren a century ago.
Polypodium glycyrrhiza 'Malahatense' £4
Bipinnatifid, sterile form of a North American species, found in British Columbia. They say the rhizomes taste sweet - I'm yet to be convinced.
Polystichum acrostichoides £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 £4.50
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, long and slender, 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 quite small  (i.e. not 1m tall) 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 quite similar, and they make very nice plants. These plants are from tissue culture. So now you know (maybe). P.S. almost nobody asks us for it, despite our price being competitive. Don't go imagining you're getting non-TC plants from anyone else unless they actually tell you so. Even then, you might want to ask them to swear it's not a division from previously tissue cultured stock. I'm not bitter…

Primula - click here

Prosartes (see Disporum, at least for now…)

Pulmonaria 'Benediction' £4.50
We've broken our 'no Pulmonarias cos nobody buys them' rule. 'Benediction' is not only so very good - a rich true blue with nice round spots, it also remains quite hard to obtain.
Pulmonaria 'Open Skies' £5.50 NEW CULTIVAR NAME
A unique variegated lungwort, found by the eagle-eyed Kevin 'Beeches' Marsh as a sport on 'Blue Buttons'. The flowers, of course, are blue, the variegation quite impressive and (touch wood) stable: the leaf has a broad white outer zone; the inner green zone is rather irregularly shaped and generally two-tone, with the upper epidermis lifting away from the underlying green tissue in places to give a lighter shade. Moreover, the young leaves have a distinct pink flush in spring, visible in the white region. It's not the most vigorous plant, as you'd expect, although considerably keener to live and mulitply than, say, 'Chintz'. As a result Kevin finds it almost ungrowable in the semi-desert to the south-east of Cambridge; a plant for the wetter north and west. He couldn't think of a name for it, so I'm to blame for this one, commemorating its birthplace among the wide horizons of East Anglia (and under the Stanstead flightpath…)

Ranunculus ficaria cultivars
These are Lesser Celandines, which can be a bit invasive. (Just making sure you knew.)
Ranunculus ficaria var. aurantiacus £3.50
Rich orangey flowers, leaves marked silver and black.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Aglow in the Dark' £3.50
Bright yellow flowers scream out from among almost black leaves.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Art Nouveau' £3.50
Unusual wavy outline to the leaves - they look almost lobed. Yellow, narrow-petalled flowers. Rarely seen. Thanks to Ruth Boundy. Unfortunately this is in the print version of the catalogue as 'Modern Art' (which is a snowdrop, of course) due to a slip of the brain.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Elan' £3.50
Pale yellow petals, regular double.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Ken Aslet double' £3.50
White, grey backed petals, regular.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Ragamuffin' £3.50
A seriously weird mutant, a full double in which the 'petals' are thick and leafy in texture, yellow and dark green. Strangely attractive.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Witchampton' £3.50
Silver mottled leaves, ordinary yellow flowers.
Ranunculus ficaria ssp. chrysocephalus £4
Really different. A gigantic, yellow flowered celandine, giving the impression of a (not very) small Caltha, but flowering in early spring. Thanks to Olive Mason, who gives it garden room among the very choicest snowdrops and aconites, where it seeds around benignly. 'Pulls up easily if it gets in the way' she reassured me.
Ranunculus repens 'Snowdrift' £4
Very white variegated creeping buttercup. The variegation knocks a lot of the violence out of it, but at the end of the day it's still a creeping buttercup, with the usual yellow flowers.