Is finding that rare plant a challenge?

So, you saw an amazing plant growing in someone’s garden last year.

You asked for the name, even wrote it down, determined to find seeds and have it growing in your garden this year. For weeks you’ve been scouring seed catalogues and spent hours Googling the name, yet never finding seeds, at least from a legitimate seed company. Oh, you may have found something similar for 99 cents on eBay that ships, if you’re lucky, from a source far, far away.

It could be that you didn’t write the name down correctly or were given the wrong one, especially if it was mangled botanical Latin. Maybe it was a common name, but that’s unreliable if it’s in use for a dozen different plants around the globe.

Producers don’t help when they give plants a catchy name for marketing purposes. Take heuchera, for instance, which many know as Coral Bells. There are so many new ones now that it’s hard to keep track, and they have names like Appletini, Brazen Raisin or Cherry Truffles — or were they the cupcakes I saw at the bakeshop?

Even if you have an accurate name, you can’t find seeds for that amazing plant because they aren’t available, especially if the plant was a cultivated variety. There are varieties and there are cultivated varieties, usually abbreviated to cultivar, and the two terms are confused and abused. Varieties usually occur naturally, and plants grown from the seeds produced usually result in offspring that are the same as the parent plant. A cultivated variety, however, is created by a plant breeder, usually by hybridizing or from a chance mutation in a plant, called a sport. It would then be patented, and reproduction prohibited. And because it is a unique hybrid, the seeds may be sterile or will not grow true to the original plant, hence are not marketed.

Cultivars are produced vegetatively by way of cuttings, or more likely now through tissue culture, resulting in perfect clones of the original plant. The process takes place in commercial labs. Tissue is taken from the plant to be cultured and grown in a suitable medium until it’s large enough to be shipped as tiny slips to growers who produce the plants for garden centres.

Now, if you had begged a cutting from the owner of the plant you saw, you could grow an identical one although you would be breaking the law. Providing you don’t go into mass production and start selling them, it’s unlikely the patent police would show up in your garden (at least they haven’t yet).

Cultivars can be identified by the name on the label. The catchy name after the genus and species will be surrounded by single quotation marks or preceded by the abbreviation, CV.

As for those eBay seeds (and there are legitimate suppliers), many a gardener has been tempted to buy seeds for that amazing rainbow rose with petals in assorted colours. Sadly, there’s no such thing, unless you find one as a cut flower at a florist. The petals are dyed in a process developed in the Netherlands.

This brings us back to that plant you admired in your friend’s garden. If it was a cultivar, the only way you’re going to see it growing in your garden is if you find it at a garden centre, or you find some guy selling them from a car or down a dark alley. No, I do not live down a dark alley.

To chat with local gardeners, visit Grand Gardeners on Facebook.