Patience key to rare flowering perennials

Press, 16 August 1985, Page 14

Patience key to rare flowering perennials

«ARDENER’S W DIARY

Derrick Rooney

Spectacular, but not easy to come by

As a poet once said, hope springs eternal. I’m now on my fourth hopeful round of the struggle to establish two of the most spectacular of all flowering perennials — Eremurus robustus and Ostrowskya magnifica — and this time I might have cracked it.

I was a bit worried a month or two back when the young shoots of the eremurus suddenly rotted off, but an inspection last week-end revealed that they weren’t suffering from anything worse than winter. Underneath the grit mulch on the seedpan are fat young shoots, ready to emerge when the snow melts.

Of course, there’s a long way to go yet (about six years from sowing the seeds to the first flower) but from all accounts the first year is the critical time.

That’s always been my hang-up with them in the past; now I believe the secret is to leave them to grow undisturbed for as long as possible, and next month, instead of pricking out the young plants into separate little pots I shall repot the whole clump of seedlings into a bigger container.

By this time next year they may be big enough to care for themselves.

Eremurus — there are a dozen or more species — are known as foxtail lilies because of their giant, brush-like flower spikes which may rise two metres or more high. The wild species are white, pink, or yellow, and they come from dry areas of Eastern

Europe and Central Asia. The best one comes from Iran and Afghanistan, and are thus now in the category of forbidden fruits for Western gardeners. Fortunately most of the species are in cultivation in Europe and Britain, where they have been hybridised to create some splendid garden plants in a range of colours not found in the wild. Eremurus robustus has pink flowers and my record with it is not good; two previous batches of seed made healthy little plants by the first autumn but were never seen again. In fact, there’s a bit of a jinx on all my efforts with eremurus.

A friend gave me a small plant of the white Eremurus himalaicus and I clucked over it for a couple of years, then decided it wasn’t doing well, and moved it. That didn’t hurt it — I took extreme care not to damage its fleshy, starfishclump of roots, and planted it with due care and reverence in a well-nourished bit df fresh ground, slightly raised for that little extra bit of drainage. And then I forgot it, didn’t I! While looking for somewhere to plant a new fuchsia I pushed a spade into the ground and sliced the dor-

mant crown off the eremurus.

This happened more than a year ago, and the roots are still there, looking as plump and happy as a starfish at half-tide, but there’s not a trace of a new shoot.

Last Saturday I scraped some soil away to have a poke at them, and there wasn’t a sign of rot; now I’m more curious about how long the roots will survive without any top growth than about whether they will shoot again. It would be nice to see it growing again, because the eremurus are not plants that you can come by in your ordinary neighbour-

hood garden centre. One mail-order nursery in the North Island has offered young specimens from time to time, but asks the earth for them — well, more than I can afford, anyway. Ostrowskya magnifica is a Central Asian plant which puts many gardeners in the same boat. It is related to the campanulas (bellflowers) and is well named, because once established and flowering well it is magnificent, with its whorls of glaucous foliage and large, pristine white or blue-veined flowers.

Like many members of the family, it has fleshy, parsnip-like roots; but it is dormant for much of the year. The difficulty with Os-

trowskya magnifica isn’t so much in keeping it once you have it established as in getting it through infancy — or indeed, getting it to germinate at all. I think the seed must have a fairly limited life, because although I’ve asked for it every time I’ve seen it on a seed list, I’ve habitually failed to germinate it. It wasn’t just me, because other people failed with it, too.

Last year I was lucky enough to get a few fairly fresh seeds which had been collected in the Pamir Mountains, one of the areas where ostrowskya grows wild, and you could have heard the sounds of celebration from Australia when four little shoots appeared in the seed pan.

A friend who obtained some seeds from the same source a year earlier also had germination, but lost all his seedlings after pricking them out, so I decided to leave mine well alone until they were through their first year.

Exploratory surgery on the seed-pan last week-end revealed five plump white little resting rhizomes, so next week I shall repot the lot, holus-bolus, into a bigger planter bag. When they grow a bit — if they grow a bit — I shall plant them out into the garden, into some deep soil, slightly raised for perfect drainage. If all goes well they should be in flower two or three years later, at which time it may once again be necessary for the Australians to hold on to their eardrums.