Bright spots in dull spring
If I have a favourite time in the garden, it is late midOctober, when growth is swinging away, the rock garden is at its peak, irises are out, the rhododendrons are full blown, and the earliest roses are appearing.
That represents an ideal, of course. This year the irises seemed to be over in a few days, the rhododendrons (such of them as flowered) were singed by frost, and the rock garden seemed to lack the usual colour.
But spring wasn’t all disappointment. At regular intervals, little treasures popped up and made it all seem worth while. Two of them, both irises, flowered last week — something old, and something new (and blue). The newcomer is Iris sintenisii, which I raised from seed a few years ago, and which flowered for the first time. The other is an antique — the border iris “Gracchus,” which goes back to mid-Victorian times and has a lot of the Victorian love of rich and intricate design about it. Iris sintenisii is a delightful little plant which comes from southern Italy and the Balkans.
Superficially, its spidery
flowers resemble those of the much bigger Dutch and Spanish irises or the tiny winter-flowering reticulata irises. But I. sintenisii belongs to a different section of the iris genus, the sporia section, one of the features of which is that the species in it have rhizomatous, not bulbous, roots. I like Iris sintenisii, and I can’t think why it isn’t more popular with rock gardeners. It doesn’t grow more than shin high, carries its flowers clear of the leaves, tolerates summer drought once established, and is very free flowering.
In shape and bearing its flowers very much resemble those of another little spuria iris, I. graminea, and both have attractive little striped “spoons” at the ends of the falls.
But whereas the flowers of sintenisii are carried above the foliage, those of graminea tend to nestle among the leaves. Graminea is heavily scented of almonds; sintenisii is scentless.
WARDENER’S W DIARY
Derrick Rooney
I should say, in my garden it is scentless. Scent in flowers is an unpredictable thing, and what smells sweetly in one garden may not do so in another, just as a flower that is sweetly scented today may be scentless tomorrow. I struck an embarrassing example of this homily last year, when showing a group of alpine experts around. “Smell this,” I said, directing them to the white Clematis montana wilsonii on the fence. “It’s like hot chocolate — that’s how you distinguish it from Clematis
spooneri.” They sniffed, and they sniffed — and got not a whiff of scent. I tried, and I couldn’t get anything, either. But the next day the aroma of chocolate was back.
This year I repeated the experiment, and once again the clematis was one day completely without scent. On the next day, the air all around it was redolent of hot chocolate. To return to the irises: as well as the differences in presentation and scent, there are colour differences, and the two flower at different times — graminea begins earlier, and its flowers are in two tones of reddish purple, whereas those of sintenisii are a clear lavender purple with little or no red in them.
A trap for young players lies herein, because there is a variety of graminea,
known as I. pseudocyperus, which has no scent, carries its flowers clear of the leaves, and leans more towards the lavender than the red side of purple. All I can say is that if you put the two side by side the difference becomes obvious. In any case, a welltempered garden ought to have all three.
“Gracchus” is not the only uncommon bearded iris which has been a source of great delight this year. Another is “Theseus,” one of a group known as the “Regelia-cyclus hybrids,” a group of plants which used to be grown much more often then they are today. They are derived from species that occur naturally in the arid, semi-desert wastes of the Middle East and Central Asia, and are characterised both by their large and spectacularly coloured flowers and by their
reluctance to produce them in cultivation.
Many Regelias — including “Dardanus” and “Cytha,” both of which I have had and lost and now cannot replace — are notable for the intricate patterns of contrasting veining on their flowers. “Theseus,” however, is a clear, solid purple — an entrancingly rich colour.
The heat and droughts of the last two summers probably pushed it into flowering this year, for the first time in the five years or so that I have grown it. Oddly enough, its garden companion, Iris hoogiana, a related species which I have grown about the same length of time, has not yet flowered for me— although the books say that it is much easier. The continued existence of “Gracchus” in gardens is a tribute to a few dedicated iris enthusiasts who keep it going from year to year. This remarkable plant belongs to a group of bearded irises known as border ir-
ises, which flower late, with the tall kinds, but are the height of intermediate kinds and have dainty small flowers and thin stems. They are very graceful plants.
“Gracchus” is an antique. It was raised about 1880, I believe, by a man named Thomas Ware, and won a first-class certificate when exhibited at Wisley in 1885. There is still nothing like it.
The pedigree of “Gracchus” is lost in the mists of time, but its whole structure suggests that there is more than a dash of the wild species, Iris variegata, in it. The standards are soft yellow, and the falls are creamy white, intricately marked and veined with maroon. The effect is stunning.
I acquired “Gracchus” several years ago, and planted it out somewhere in my garden, where it was promptly swallowed up in the undergrowth. At the iris show at Labour Day weekend I greatly admired some stems of it on the showbench, and was heard to complain that it never flowered for me. Two days later it made a liar of me.
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