The first rose of SPRINGTIME
Beautiful, simple primroses add a little welcome wild wood charm
Please don’t ask me what my favourite flower is. To choose one in particular always seems so rude to the others and, anyway, doesn’t it just depend on what time of year it is? Having said that, I’ve always stayed true to one little flower that’s just coming into bloom. This is a flower beloved by millions and claimed by many English counties as their own, which shows how widespread it is. When our island was covered in woods and forest it would have been ubiquitous. It’s a small flower, nothing about it is ostentatious. Its flowers are subtle and it gives its name to a colour, the palest of pale yellows. It is, of course, the primrose – the ‘prima rosa’, the first rose of spring. With five notched petals this has to be one of the simplest of flowers. At the centre the petals have egg-yolk yellow bases, no doubt a pollen guide for any insects on the wing. Primroses have evolved a brilliant strategy, first recorded by Charles Darwin and more recently Phil Gilmartin. Each plant has flowers with either a ‘pin’ or a ‘thrum’ centre. In pin-eyed flowers, the stigma, the female part of the flower which receives the pollen and is directly connected to the ovary where the seeds will eventually form, protrudes from the corolla tube. In thrum-eyed flowers the stigma is invisible, halfway down the corolla tube and obscured by the anthers at the top of the stamens – the male part of the flower which bears the pollen. By having these two types of flower, pollen is collected or deposited on the other kind of flower. Selfpollination results in a diminishing genetic pool, whereas this arrangement guarantees diversity.
All the primroses in our garden have been grown from seed (sometimes self-sown) or occasionally division. We started off with one plant bought from a wildflower nursery. There are scores of plants now, needless to say the best clumps are the ones that have self-sown in corners close to the roots of shrubs and trees.
The most exciting way to grow new primroses is from green seed. When the seed pod is nicely swollen and spherical but still green, it can be detached from the plant and split open with a thumb nail. Before doing this it pays to prepare a half seed tray with seed compost because the green seeds clustered inside tend to be sticky and sometimes you almost have to wipe them on the surface of the compost. The surface is covered with a layer of fine grit and watered by standing the tray in shallow water until the surface of the grit changes colour. These are tough plants and their seed doesn’t need cosseting – a sheltered corner outside is fine. After a few weeks the surface will change to green as seed germinates, a few weeks after that, the seedlings can be gently lifted from the tray using their seed leaves and transferred to individual compartments in a module tray or spaced out in a deep seed tray. Eventually their leaves will get bigger and, as they touch each other, they can be moved on again into recycled pots.
The greatest joy, though, is planting them out to form a little colony, introducing the edge of a wild wood into your garden.
‘I’ve always stayed true to one little flower that’s just coming into bloom’