Sanguisorba - Siphocranion

Sanguisorba
Stout perennials for the border, all with smart pinnate leaves and bottle-brush flower heads late in the summer. Generally best in full sun and a moist, fertile soil. See Julian's comprehensive article in The Plantsman for June 07 (brag, brag).

Sanguisorba albiflora £5
A shorter plant, of the obtusa persuasion, at 60cm or so. White flowers in chunky bottle brushes.
Sanguisorba canadensis £5
Tall and stately, approaching 2m in flower with long slender white inflorescences on red stems.
Sanguisorba dodecandra £5
Rarely grown but attractive species from a small region of the Italian Alps. Droopy white catkins, smart rather blueish leaves. 1m. Thanks to Ingo Kaczmarek.
Sanguisorba aff. hakusanensis £5
A solid, compact one with fat pink inflorescences. 1m.
Sanguisorba magnifica £6
Michael Wickenden's unique collection from the Russian Far East, a distinct regional variant of the obtusa complex. 50cm, with grey green leaves and drooping, soft pink bottle brushes. Found on limestone cliffs (never a good sign) but has proved itself easy in the company of Acanthus spp. on the edge of a really sunny bank, where our heavy wet soil dries out in summer. Rather splendid.
Sanguisorba menziesii £5
Very distinctive blue-green foliage with reddish petioles. Maroon, drooping inflorescences. 60cm or so.
Sanguisorba obtusa white flowered £4
A white flowered form of this stout, splendidly glaucous leaved species. Not typical albiflora.
Sanguisorba officinalis early form £5
June flowering, about 1.6m tall with ovoid maroon inflorescences and well textured pinnate leaves. Passed around in the UK as stipulata which, bluntly, it is not. I rate it highly. Thanks to Paul 'Abbey' Bygrave.
Sanguisorba officinalis 'Martin's Mulberry' £6
Simply the best tall officinalis, self supporting and tidy, unlike that floppy old 'Arnhem'. Midseason dark red globby heads. Introduced by those good people at West Acre.
Sanguisorba officinalis 'Red Thunder' £5
Another tall red one, flowering in late summer.
Sanguisorba officinalis 'Tanna' £4.50
A short (30cm), densely running, front of border plant with round leaflets and deep red globular flower heads.
Sanguisorba officinalis DJHC 535 £5
A very late flowering form, from China.
Sanguisorba 'Pink Tanna' £4.50
Taller than 'Tanna', around 60cm, but wiry and with the same running habit. Clear pink, upright, slender flower spikes in early summer. A hybrid from Coen Jansen.
Sanguisorba tenuifolia var. parviflora £5
Very like the previous plant, but the leaflets are even narrower and held more or less horizontal even when the plane of the leaf is inclined steeply upwards. This all sounds rather technical but the effect is very beautiful.
Sanguisorba tenuifolia var. purpurea £5
A nice plant, but to optimists the name implies really dark purple flowers. They are purple, but at the red-pink end of that difficult colour. 1m-ish. Late flowering with us.
Sauromatum venosum £4.50
Bold, arisaema-like aroid. Very late into growth. Bold leaves with 9 leaflets, pale green petioles splodged purple. Long, horizontal, spotty spathes before the leaves in spring. Smells of a long-dead animal eaten then vomited by a dog. (Guess what? Nobody ordered it last year!) Can be hardy if mulched well.
Saxifraga fortunei 'Black Ruby' £4
Dark, almost black foliage; red-pink flowers in autumn. Height 20cm, for moist soil in shade.
Saxifraga fortunei 'Conwy Snow' £3.50
White flowered mini-fortunei selected by Keith 'Aberconwy' Lever.
Saxifraga fortunei 'Mount Nachi' £4
Another nice (and normal-sized) form, with bronzed foliage, brown even, and good sized inflorescences of contrasting white flowers.
Saxifraga fortunei 'Wada' £4
Larger copper tinted leaves, and taller in flower, reaching 50cm.
Saxifraga epiphylla 'Little Piggy' £3.75
Small dense rosettes of peculiarly thick, stiff, dark green, kidney shaped leaves which are spectacularly red veined underneath, requiring some effort to admire them since they are very close to the ground. Tiny plantlets are produced where the leaf lamina meets the petiole. The white flowers have ridiculously elongated lower petals. For a cool safe place in a humusy soil. Decidedly odd, but very attractive to those of us who are prepared to look closely.
Saxifraga nipponica 'Pink Pagoda' £4
Evergreen hairy leaves in low mounds. Lots of  pink flowers in 30cm inflorescences. For moister shade.

Schizostylis (see Hesperantha)

Scilla autumnalis £3.50
Our native, violet flowered Autumn Squill. From cultivated stock originating on the South Devon coast. Flowers in high summer here. For rock garden etc where it seeds around benignly.
Scilla hohenackeri BSBE 811 £3.50
30cm winter grower with impressive puplish blue flowers in early spring. Makes a good clump. Hardy, from Kurdistan.
Scilla hyacinthoides  £6
Quite a large bulb, with a basal rosettes over wuinter and a slender spike of light blue flowers on top of a very tall stem, in spring. Dryish summer dormancy. From an old Archibald collection in Turkey.
Scilla lingulata S&F253 £3.50
The 10cm spikes of light blue flowers emerge with, not before the rosette of tongue shaped leaves, in September. A tightly clumping bulb. Leave in one pot for several years - a good dense colony looks a treat.
Scilla persica £3.50
Lots of small soft blue flowers in a big airy spike to 30cm tall. More delicate than the imposing heads of peruviana, but still one of the large species.

Scilla peruviana
At long last we have several clones to offer from our large (too large Sarah tells me) collection of this variable Iberian / North African species. This is a large, winter growing, more-or-less summer dormant bulb, hardy in a sunny place which dries out in summer. Flowers are many, in large, pyramidal inflorescences in spring. The larger the bulb, the bigger the inflorescence. I'd like to emphasize that these are divisions (a slow process) not open-pollinated seedlings which would be easy to raise in quantity, but very dubiously true to type.
Scilla peruviana 'Alba' £4
White flowers.
Scilla peruviana var. elegans £5
Dark violet flowers.
Scilla peruviana 'Hughii' £5
Purple buds open lilac-blue.
Scilla peruviana 'Paul Voelcker' £12
Biscuit-coloured flowers with electric blue filaments; the inflorescences are broad but compact, on short stems. The leaves have a notable hyaline margin which I associate with North African forms of the species, although it is not at all certain that this is African. Probably a bit less hardy than the usual Iberian ones, but certainly OK under unheated glass. Totally outrageous! as our daughter would say in a dreadful American accent. Thanks to John Newbold and, in turn, to the Voelcker family. Few.
Scilla peruviana var. venusta £5
Attractive long, hanging bracts; many small light blue flowers.

Scilla verna £3.50
Our native Spring Squill. Tiny bulbs with ground level leaves and pale blue flowers in spring. Quickly bulks up to form a fine colony in the rock garden or a pan. Sun. From a cultivated stock originating from West Cornwall. Some of the Continental forms seem less tight to the ground.
Scutellaria baicalensis £3.50
Dense spikes of violet blue flowers on a short bushy plant.
Sedum telephium  'Xenox' AGM £4
One of the most satisfactory of the big dark leaved varieties. 30cm. Reddish flowers.
Semiaquilegia ecalcarata £4
Little spurless violet aquilegia flowers on a well branched 50cm plant. An old favourite returns.
Semiaquilegia ecalcarata Australian form £4
Unusual pale pink (and rather shorter) strain of the spurless mini-columbine, introduced from Aussie cultivation by Rosy and Rob Hardy. Grows and flowers as easily as the normal sort, unlike that infuriating bicolor which I swear has been genetically engineered to fail on any nursery more than 5 miles from Caernarvon...
Sempervivum 'Bronco' £3.75
Just to keep you on your toes, a house leek. A good 'un, though, with nice red tinted rosettes, pink flowers and a hearty constitution.
Sempervivum 'Othello' £4
Huge dark red (in sun) pseudo-echeveria rosettes. Some people are amazed that it's a sempervivum at all.
Sempervivum 'Red Delta' £3.50
Smaller, cobwebby rosettes, still a good red.
Senecio polyodon £4.50
One of the purple flowered South African species, with quite a few smaller daisies in a head, seeding around benignly in sunny, well drained places. Height around 50cm. Short-lived perennial.
Senecio pulcher £5
Very large, vivid magenta, yellow-eyed daisies over dark, glossy, leathery leaves. Runs gently in rich, not boggy soil in full sun. Hardy south and west, as a rule of thumb. 40cm. Best of all, it flowers in October!
Sidalcea reptans £5
A little creeping, pink flowered wetland species from the American West. Rarely seen in cultivation.
Silene dioica 'Inane' £4.50
Purple leaved male red campion. Very effective.
Siphocranion macranthum £4.50
Many, rather floppy stems carry small hairy leaves which take on purple tints and look, rather than feel, wonderfully velvety. Bright, rich purple flowers like a narrowly tubular snapdragon, in autumn. Very distinct. For a moist-but-well-drained soil away from bright sunlight.