Carol Klein is praising primroses
If it's charm you're after in your garden plump for wild ones and the older hybrids...
Where we live, the primrose is one of our most familiar wildflowers but despite this, when the first pale flowers peep through the remnants of last autumn’s leaves, a charge of excitement takes hold, subsiding gradually into the happy realisation that spring is with us.
Flower follows flower until the steep banks of our Devon lanes are lit with clump after clump of its dainty flowers. For purity and simplicity Primula vulgaris, our native primrose, is unparalleled.
Although there are now cultivated primulas of every different shape and size and a whole spectrum of colour, the wild primrose and older hybrids have by far the most charm.
Primula ‘Wanda’ has been around for decades and despite it being one of the most familiar of all the primula hybrids, it’s one of the most special.
Its strident magenta flowers are a familiar feature to town and country dwellers alike.
When I was young it used to fill the little front gardens of the miners’ and millworkers’ terraces. It’s an easy plant to ‘pass around’ and, since it’s almost indestructible it encourages new gardeners to have a go. Probably a hybrid with Primula juliae,a tough little alpine primrose, it has a robust constitution and goes on for years without attention.
Recently, it has lent its genes to a whole range of ‘Wanda’ hybrids; short, stocky plants often with dark leaves and richlycoloured dark flowers with yellow in their centres, an inheritance from another contributor, primula Cowichan Strain. They were developed by Florence Bellis, an American concert pianist who, having no work at the time of the Great Depression, decided to earn her living breeding primulas and trying to sell them. She settled as a haylofter in a barn in Oregon with two pianos and a tattered trunk and called her house and new enterprise Barnhaven. Originally all her seed was from England and over a period of more than 30 years she worked on perfecting different strains, including the Cowichans. ‘Striped Victorians’, ‘Chartreuse’, ‘Desert Sunset’ and Grand Canyon Strain are examples of her work.
Later she succeeded in developing a seed strain that regularly produced doubleflowered forms of the primrose. Using pollen from an exquisite old French primrose, ‘Marie Crousse’, she crossed and back-crossed her plants. Double primroses are sterile so it was no mean feat that, after years of patient work, she achieved her objective. Eventually she gave the results of all her work to Jared and Sylvia Sinclair who continued her mission with the same ethos. Nowadays Barnhaven has crossed the Channel and continues to produce seed and plants.
We’re planting out some of the plants we grew from Barnhaven seed, trying to marry the colour of their flowers to the predominant colours in different beds.
Although primroses are, by their nature, edge of woodland plants and like a little dappled shade, they thrive on the sunnier side of the garden where taller growing perennials will provide shade later on.