Thursday, July 8, 2010

More serendipity!


You can look up the Rock Garden (the Scottish Rock Garden Club bulletin) from several years ago and see almost the same picture: I mislabeled it in that august journal, and seek to make amends: it is NOT Campanula choruhensis, but I surmise it is a hybrid with that and Campanula trogerae. I grow both these Turkish gems, the first introduced by Zdenek Zvolanek some fifteen years ago and the second by Jim and Jenny Archibald at about the same time. I believe that Rocky Mountain Rare Plants (a seed company I operated back then) was the first company to offer the first, and the first to sell cultivated seed of the latter. Growing them in the same garden poses risks, the obvious risk being hybridization...
I know this hybrid has occurred elsewhere, but this plant germinated and grew in the crevice of a sandstone wall in my front yard (where I never in a million years would have planted it: too darned hot there!) It's right next to where I often scatter chaff as I clean seed. I have no doubt this was an accidental by product of the seed cleaning process...and the finest specimen of its kind that you are likely to encounter!
The gardening year is a sort of pageant of special events: the first Adonis in January some years, the first crocus, the tulips, daffodils and so on. Watching this stunning campanula do its thing next to the path I walk past many times a day has become my early summer ritual. Funny how much this sort of thing matters to us plant nerds.
I feel so sorry for ordinary folk. Forgive them Lord: they know not what they're missing!

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