And now, Derrick’s law

Press, 23 September 1983, Page 14

And now, Derrick’s law

Gardener’s ! DIARY

Derrick Rooney

Plants and pets don’t mix. To this hoary-headed dictum of gardening might be added Derrick’s law, which is that if a pet is going to damage a plant, it will damage a rare or a precious plant. This is a law that I passed unilaterally in the heat of the moment a few weeks ago, when we arrived home from a day in the city to find that while the humans were away, the Siamese cat had been at play — among the pot plants on the terrace. And of the plants that he had knocked down from a high shelf while recapturing a reluctant silvereye, the only fatalities were two of the most precious — a variegated zonal pelargonium named ‘Lass O’ Gowrie” and the “burro’s tail” succulent, Sedum morganianum.

I didn’t so much mind the loss of the pelargonium (it was a weakly miserablegrowing thing however rare it was and however beautiful its leaves), but the demise of the sedum was a blow because I had raised it from a cutting and after several years it had just reached a nice, flowering size.

A curious feature of this succulent is that it is one of those plants that people talk of as “old fashioned,” as

“granny’s plants,” whereas in truth it is, as popular succulents go, a Johnny-come-lately which has been in cultivation outside an obscure village in Mexico for less than 50 years. Its original habitat has never been found, and noone has seen it as a wild plant. The “burro’s tail” was introduced to widespread cultivation by the late Eric Walther, who found it in a small, local nursery in the village of Coatepec, Vera Cruz, Mexico, about 1935. It was then known only by its local name, “cola de burro” — which translates, of course, as “donkey’s tail.” Walther took specimens home to California, where, in 1938, they flowered in the garden of his colleague, Dr Meredith Morgan. The bright pink blooms, carried prominently at the ends of the dangling branches, proved it to be a new species of sedum, which Walther named after his colleague — Sedum morganianum. Some 34 years later, an American succulent collector visited the same township in Vera Cruz — and took home for a California nurseryman a similar, but more compact, plant which had no name. About the same time, the Huntingdon

Botanic Garden, in California, also acquired the new plant from a nursery in Guadalajara. Once again, information about its origin was tantalisingly scarce — the Guadalajara plant had come from another nursery; the Coatepec one “might” have been collected in the mountains, but no-one was sure.

Pretty soon California nurseries were distributing it under the name “Burrito,” meaning “little donkey,” and eventually this became its official name. Obviously Sedum Burrito and S. morganianum are very closely related; there is little, if any, floristic difference between them. Both have bright pink flowers, quite large by sedum standards, as they are about Icm long. The big donkey is possibly more free flowering than the little one; but the little one compensates for this by furnishing itself with more handsome leafage, densely packed on the branches and held horizontally, so that it forms pretty patterns. Both are fairly slow growing, so that a plant of any size is likely to be a fairly old one — the weeping branches of my “little donkey,” started from a cutting three years ago, are just reaching the bottom of a 15cm pot. Making even slower progress is a third kind of burro’s tail, said to be a form of S. morganianum, or a closely related species. A friend gave me a tiny cutting, about 3cm long, about 18 months ago. This plant is more mysterious than the others. My friend called it “Sedum morganianum dwarf form,” because this is the name under which he received it from another collector. He fancied it might have been

imported — but from where? No-one knows. So far, there have been no flowers. If it does flower, and does prove to be a ; microform of S. morganianum, the problem of naming it will become more acute. How can you have a diminutive of a diminutive? 2 Until a solution to this ; puzzle presents itself, both plants are being kept well out of cat reach.