Home & People Ruthlessness for primroses

Press, 29 March 1979, Page 15

Home & People Ruthlessness for primroses

Primroses, though ' not quite in season, have stolen the limelight in our garden this week; after the rains of last week, and with frosts getting closer by the day, the annual primrose ritual has become urgent. The ritual is a simple one: every old clump (that is, every clump that has not been touched for two years or longer) is suffering the indignity of the spade. The plants are coming out; the newer shoots from the outside are being put aside for replanting; and the old worn-out rhizomes are going on the trailer to go to the dump. The job must be done soon, so that the plants have time to grow fresh roots before winter. If they do not, they will die. This is ruthless treatment, but no-one has a successful garden without exercising a wheelbarrowload of ruthlessness; and primroses, like michaelmas daisies, need frequent doses of it if they afe to survive. They have another requirement, too, that many gardeners overlook: manure, and lots of it. Primroses rank alongside rhubarb, pumpkins, and artichokes in the top five greedy feeders. Each small piece of my plants, as it goes back into the ground, goes on top of a good spadeful of well-weathered manure. I use pig manure, simply because I have a source of supply; cow manure, if you can get it, is even better. I have a large number of primroses dotted about the garden, and although they

make a lot of work at times, and some of the choice ones have a habit of disappearing, I like them. Best of all I like the common primrose — the true English primrose. This is the pale creamy yellow (to be explicit about it, primrose yellow) form of Primula vulgaris, sometimes called Primula acaulis, that is widespread in Western Europe, and

comes in several geographic colour forms. These colour forms, including the misty mauve Primula altaica, and the reddish P. rubra (both are really subspecies of vulgaris) produced a range of colours from white to near-blue when crossed into the yellow forms in the nineteenth century. Modern primroses are derived from these crosses, with an infusion of the blood of a Transcaucasian species, Primula juliae, which was not introduced to cultivation in Western Europe until 1912. The modern hybrids are sold as bedding plants, and while they are seldom as good as the named varieties (which have been selected from countless thousands of seedlings) they are very useful garden plants because for their first couple of years of life they tend to flower intermittently throughout the year, and if they are divided and replanted regularly there is almost always a patch of flowers somewhere in the garden.

I suppose their hybrid origins have some hand in this eccentricity; whatever the explanation, they settle down if undivided for a couple of years, and begin flowering at the “normal” time, which is late winter to spring.

Primula vulgaris is evergreen and larger than P. juliae, and is a hedgerow plant; it grows well under deciduous trees with non-greedy roots (crabapples, primus species, or silver birches) or in ordinary beds where summer shade is provided by taller herbaceous plants.

Primroses want sun in winter only; in the wild they grow among grasses that die down in winter.

They are good for underplanting roses because, apart from their affinity of names, both roses and primroses like a good feed of manure in the winter.

The name “primrose” is actually a corruption of “prima rosa,” meaning “earliest rose,” a hangover from the days when nearly everything that flowered was called a rose. But the two have no botanical relationship. Primula juliae is a smaller plant than vulgaris, and whereas vulgaris has biggish, crinkly leaves, juliae has small, roundish, glossy leaves, and quite large

purple flowers with a contrasting white or pale yellow eye. It is a deciduous species, having its dormant period in the heat of summer and leafing out again in autumn.

Like its cousin, it should not be too parched in summer, and should have some shade then, preferably provided by a large rock, beneath which its roots can spread and stay cool. It is a much tougher plant than it looks, and even though it is only an inch or two high when in flower it is not at all hard to grow, and is a better plant than most of the hybrids. The same could be said of P. altaica and P. vulgaris itself, especially in selected forms such as

“Harbinger,” very pale cream, originally found growing wild in an English wood and now offered by some growers in a fixed seed strain. There used to be hundreds of named varieties, but few survive; modern plants are usually raised from seed, and now come, like polyanthus, in colour-fixed strains — red, yellow, white, cream, blue, and flesh pink. I have never seen one that could be called vulgar, despite the name, though I could not say that of the grossly overblown modern polyanthus. Among the survivors are the incomparable “Wanda,” in which juliae blood dominated, and is obvious in the claret flowers and round, glossy leaves. This, when well placed in surroundings that tone down the brashness of its flowers (say, between two weathered sandstone rocks) is a peerless primrose. “Pam” is in the same colour range, but is more restrained, and has the interesting habit of sometimes producing a few “hose-in-hose” flowers at the tail end of the season. “Wanda,” too, has a hose-in-hose form.

The influence of P. juliae is even stronger in “Betty Green,” which is a very small and neat primrose with bright red flowers. The double primroses are a different story. One reads of huge banks of them, of vast clouds of blossom, on these plants i n great-grandmother’s day, but the ones that survive seem to be very tern peramental ,and have the habit of departing sud denly to the great manure heap in the sky. The Rev. Dr P. Mules (whose name is commemorated in the common double purple aubrieta that is still without peer among aubrietas) once wrote to “The Field" about his double primroses, claiming to have had “a bed of 50 plants of the double white carrying at one time 4000 fully expanded blooms averaging 1 5/Bin diameter." His recipe for success with double primroses was “suitable soil, pure air (that rules out Christchurch), and great experience in culture.” Dr Mules’s contemporary William Robinson, author of the Victorian classic, ■ “The English Flower Garden,” wrote that for primroses “the more rich and moist the soil the better.” He suggested growing them between asparagus rows, and dividing them annually.

There is some sense in this, because primroses, and especially the double ones, which cannot set seed a ' consequently expand much more energy on flowering, are like any other rapid-growing herbaceous perennial: if not split up, fed, and given fresh soil regularly they “go back,” and lose their vigour, and once this happens they become susceptible to a variety of pests and diseases.

So my recipe for success with all primroses is not much different from that of Dr Mules: annual (or at least biennial) division, plenty of water, gccd drainage, and lots and lots of manure.

If you do not have access to manure, rotten sawdust with a dash of blood and bone and a dusting of potash will do; if you have no sawdust, use garden compost with added blood and bone. But neither of these, really, is as good as animal manure.