Golden wonders
For the past 24 years nurseryman Joe Sharman has been crossing celandines at Monksilver Nursery to create his own stunning group of garden cultivars
As the spring landscape stirs into life, hedgerows and fields are briefly scattered with gold. Not buttercups, but their early cousins, celandines, known until recently as Ranunculus ficaria but now renamed Ficaria verna. These glossy flowers are charming, perky and a boon for insects yet, in the garden, they are not universally welcome. “Celandines are a British native plant and there are two subspecies in the UK,” explains Joe Sharman, of Monksilver Nursery in Cambridgeshire. “Ficaria verna subsp. verna is found on banks and ditches – it is vigorous and weedy and spreads easily, so it can be invasive. But F. verna subsp. fertilis is a plant of ancient grassland and undisturbed meadow. It is smaller and much better behaved.”
Garden cultivars are selected from this second group, and are predominantly variations on the wild type, with gold or orange flowers and rounded, green or purple leaves. But Joe’s resolution to improve on this situation has led to a range of exciting new plants that are as hardy as they are decorative. “You have to work out what is possible, what is missing, and then put the right parents together to create what you want,” says Joe. “It starts with an observation – in this case that Ficaria verna ‘Double Bronze’ makes single seedlings, indicating that the character of doubling is genetically recessive.”
In the quiet of his nursery, Joe started tinkering. The single celandines existed in yellow, cream-white, butter-yellow and orange, but with double flowers only available in yellow or cream he was two colours short. “I wanted double flowers in all the colours, so in 1996 I crossed ‘Double Bronze’, which has yellow petals, with a bronze back, with orange Aurantiaca Group,” he says. The resulting seedlings were all single but, because some were orange and some yellow, he knew the genes had moved. “If the genes were there, it made sense that the character that I wanted would eventually emerge through natural hybridisation. So I planted them out in a corner and let them fester – it took 11 years, but it worked!” So far, this population has yielded eight different orange doubles, four of which form the basis of Joe’s French Ladies Series – ‘Nathalie’, ‘Claudine’, ‘Vanessa’ and ‘Monique’. “The other four I didn’t bother to name, as they were too similar,” he explains. “As a breeder you aim to introduce something that is unique and distinctive.”
A further breakthrough followed, with butter-yellow ‘Nicole’. Joe then moved on to leaf colour; crossing ‘Coppernob’ with ‘Double Bronze’, to produce ‘Jacqueline’, which has a strong-orange double flowers and purple leaves. Over the years, Joe has bred hundreds of plants, and although formally registering them and benefiting from them can be challenging, he remains undaunted. “I never stop – I can’t help it,” he says. “If someone says it’s impossible, that is a challenge. You observe and experiment, and then you record and learn. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you have to try. If you can think of a possibility and you know roughly how to get there, then what’s stopping you?” n
USEFUL INFORMATION
Address Monksilver Nursery, Oakington Road, Cottingham, Cambridgeshire CB24 8TW.
Tel 01954 251555. Web monksilvernursery.co.uk Open April to June, Friday and Saturday, 10am-4pm. Turn the page for more of Joe Sharman’s favourite Ficaria verna cultivars