Visions of nodding bells

Press, 5 October 1984, Page 15

Visions of nodding bells

Gardener’s ! DIARY

Derrick Rooney

The soldanellas are pretty little alpine members of the primula family which have frilly blue or purple nodding flowers in spring and distinctive round, leathery leaves which die off in winter.

They love a cool, peaty soil with plenty of grit in it, and are not too difficult to grow so long as you can shade their roots in summer and keep slugs away from them in spring, when the new foliage and flower buds are emerging. The name sounds like the essence of romanticism, conjuring up visions of nodding bells in an alpine woodland, but actually its meaning is plebeian — the name is taken from the Latin word, “solidus,” meaning a shilling, and refers to the shape of the leaves.

You might have been able to buy a soldanella for a shilling once, but you can’t now.

I like Soldanella montana, which is flowering in my

rock garden now. It seems more permanent than the others, of which I have grown several that eventually disappeared through a combination of misunderstanding, neglect, and slugs, a pest which seems to grow to enormous size and multiply, in my garden, at a rate worthy of a slot on “That’s Incredible.” At least I don’t have snails, thank heavens. Soldanella montana has from three to 10 nodding lavender bells on each stem, and grows about 10cm

high. Soldanella pindicola is similar, but larger, and little S. alpina has one to three bells on each stem.

S. villosa, one of the best though alas I no longer have it, is distinguished by a light covering of tiny reddish hairs on its flower stems, and S. minima and S. pusilia each has only one flower per stem. All are shades of lavender or purple except S. pusilia, which has white and pink

forms. The soldanellas are European plants — all are from the European Alps except for S. pindicola which, as perceptive readers will have guessed already, is from Greece.

Thlaspi rotundifolia also hails from the European Alps. This little cress is the northern equivalent of our penwiper plant, and while it can’t match the extraordinary overlapping appearance of the penwiper, it has the advantage of being easier to grow. Like the penwiper, Thlaspi rotundifolia is a scree plant, but it doesn’t seem to be too fussy about the kind of soil it has in the rock garden, so long as it isn’t allowed to cook in the summer.

The little' lilac-pink flowers are bell shaped and don’t look particularly cru-cifer-like, though the plant is a cress. The flowers are sweet-scented, but you have to get down on your knees and shove your nose right into a flower to pick it up. The woundworts — species of Anthyllis — are not in the front rank of alpine plants, but they have a place in the rock garden. Like many legumes, they will thrive in dry, hungry soil. Anthyllis vulneraria is native to Britain as well as Europe. Technically, this is a shrub, but it looks more like a herb, because its stems and leaves lie flat on the ground and look like rosettes.

The flower stems are prostrate, too, and end in leafy bracts through which clusters of little pea-flowers push. The colour is variable, from cream or yellow to crimson, but the best forms are brilliant fire-engine red. Anthyllis montana is similar, but the foliage has a touch of silver. Reference books list the flower colour as crimson, but the form cultivated in New Zealand has a dash of coffee in the colour. Propagation of these is usually by seed, but selected colour forms will grow from heeled cuttings in spring.

Anthyllis hermanniae is a small, twiggy shrub which is often overpraised in rockgarden books written in the Northern Hemisphere.

Either it is a better plant there, or we have an inferior form.

I had it in my rock garden for a year or two, but the flowers were small and such a dull yellow that it was sometimes difficult to tell whether the bush was in flower or just unhealthy. When it began to outgrow its allotted space I cut it, hard, with the hedge trimmers; and when it showed its distaste for this treatment by dying back in big patches, I kicked the whole thing out, and said good riddance to it. Don’t confuse it, by the way, with Erinacea anthyllis, the “hedgehog broom.’

This high-class dwarf shrub comes from the Mediterranean, has pungent stems and purple pea flowers, and takes ages to make a big bush. After six years growing it might be football-sized. Sharp drainage and a sunbaked aspect are what it needs. Sometimes I wish I had planted Anchusa caespitosa alongside this broom — one can imagine them sharing a sunbaked hillside.

This remarkable little forget-me-not comes from Crete, and is one of the aristocrats of the rock garden.

Narrow, greyish, rather rough leaves lie flat on the ground in rosettes, in the middle of which nestle numerous stemless forget-me-not flowers. They are coerulean blue, a colour of rare clarity.

An equally thrilling colour, but at a different part of the spectrum, is the glowing orange of Geum bulgaricum, one of the parents of a popular hybrid, “Borisii.”

As it has large leaves and can grow 25 to 30cm tall, I have it right at the bottom of the rock garden, where there are no tiny treasures to be smothered.

I like this plant, though it is prone to fits of sulks and vulnerable to grass grub, as are nearly all exotic geums (the natives seem able to cope most of the time, though the. high alpines tend to be pest-prone at rockgarden altitudes). Geum bulgaricum has flowers about the size of a 50c piece. G. “Borisii” is similar, but a harder colour. G. montanum, a European alpine, is more in tune with the rock garden. Its leaves grow in prostrate mats and its yellow flowers are nearly stemless — later, after pollinating, the stems elongate and the tasselled silver seedheads

wave well clear of the plant. Thus it has two seasons of beauty. Geum sibiricum is from Central Asia, and is similar to G. bulgaricum in size and in leafage, but whereas the flowers of bulgaricums are saucer-shaped, those of sibiricum are deeply bowlshaped. The common wild form is decribed as having scarlet flowers, but the common variety in cultivation has apricot ones, occasionally striped or splashed with rescue orange. Some clumps occasionally throw up spikes of yellow flowers. A few well-bred buttercups also feature among the early comers. Spearwort (Ranunculus gramineus) and the mountain buttercup (R. montanum) are flowering already, and the Pyrenean buttercup (R. amplexicaulis) is tardy about coming through the ground — perhaps wisely in view of this week’s weather. I like Ranunculus amplexicaulis. It has class. Lance-shaped, grey-green leaves clasp numerous stems, each carrying two or three pure white buttercups, about 3cm across. Spearwort is a taller plant and can be grown in a ■well-drained border or in the rock garden. It isn’t a nuisance in either place, because it disappears underground soon after flowering, while its fleshy, prongy roots rest up for the next season’s performace. The foliage — long, narrow, and glaucous — reappears in early winter. Thus this buttercup will tolerate prolonged drought in summer. And it flowers all the better for a baking in the sun.

Yet you seldom see it in rock gardens, and nurserymen tell me it is hard to sell. I don’t know why. It’s as easy as pie to grow, and the icy yellow of the flowers is a thrilling colour. R. montanum, which is a smaller plant with tuberous roots, has flowers of a deeper yellow.

Finished now for the season (it began in late winter) is Ranunculus calandrinioides, from Morocco.

This demands sharp drainage for the full depth of its root system, but is easy otherwise — even, it sometimes seems, too easy to be the choice plant that it

Glaucous, spear-shaped leaves appear from its fleshy roots back in late autumn, and in midwinter fat flowerbuds develop among them. Late in the winter the buds open into large, soft pink buttercups. These have the lush, soft look of a subtropical bloom, but are thoroughly hardy, they will survive being snowed on.

This buttercup appears in nurserymen’s catalogues occasionally, usually at a premium price, which it is worth. Propagation by division in early autumn in prescribed by the experts, but I haven’t managed to steel myself to distuti my plant — yet