A tale of seeds and wonder....all about seed and a special gentian

 

Gentiana paradoxa and this year's seed exchange

Today concludes the first day of the North American Rock Garden Society's (aka NARGS) seed exchange ordering: the seed will not be sent out for another few weeks since chapters of NARGS are still wrapping up the complicated task of packaging thousands of individual samples. I supervised over twenty people who packaged less than 10% of this year's seed for the Rocky Mountain Chapter (full disclosure, I'm outgoing President of that chapter and will be president of NARGS for another half year). So I have a certain vested interest in the organization and the exchange. I have several tales to tell (I thought I'd told the first one but can't locate it in any of my blogs or other writings): it concerns the gentian you see above...

It all began with a book (if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a pretty serious bibliophile. I've been locating and collecting treasured tomes for almost all my rather long life (so far)..I wish I could tell you where and how I found the "Red Book of the U.S.S.R."--it had to be 40 years ago at least--before I began my Excel file of book purchases where I track ISBN numbers, date and source [and other data] of every I book I obtain)

This is a folio sized volume bound in pseudo-leather containing hundreds of images and descriptions of rare plants of the former Soviet Union. I have had surprising luck tracking down quite a few of these and helping usher them into cultivation--this tale shall tell the story of just one of them: Gentiana paradoxa. Here is the image of that gentian from the middle of the book:

As I flipped over the pages--more than half my lifetime ago--I came onto this image and was startled by it: such a distinctive gentian! And rare to boot: I can read Cyrillic and was able to parse the text and realized it grew in a relatively limited space in Georgia (here's the map showing its range in the book):

I despaired as I gazed at this--Georgia! Not the peachy one, but the Caucasian Georgia! What hope did I have of ever going there (I eventually did go--in 2019--and got within a hundred miles of the gentian at the wrong time of the year [April] and as it turns out the part of Georgia where the gentian grows (Abkhazia) is now a "partially recognized" republic that was detached from Georgia by Russia and is held under Russia's sway--another long, complicated and rather sad story not directly relevant to the matter at hand...

Out of curiosity, I looked in I-Naturalist which did not show any distribution of the taxon, although it did say it had two observations, possibly not shown because of the plant's rareness. If you click the highlighted text you can see stunning images of the plant--presumably taken in the wild. I-Naturalist listed Richard Wilford's May 10, 2017 description of the gentian in Curtis Botanical Magazine--pages 51-57.  If you don't have a copy of that journal, you can download a .pdf from Wiley Online Library for not too dear a price. I'm just a tad smug that I beat Curtis Botanical to the punch by 25 years in my plant portrait I wrote for NARGS in 1992--and I prefer Rob Proctor's rendition to the admittedly stunning painting in the much more recent Curtis' magazine, which I shall "borrow" here:

This blog post, this article (nor Richard Wilford's Curtis' piece) would very likely not exist if it weren't for this man:

Marty Jones

Marty brought a perfectly grown specimen of Gentiana paradoxa in a pot to a meeting of the Rocky Mountain chapter of NARGS from his nursery in Avon some time in the mid- to late 1980's. I still recall my shock of recognition and enormous burst of plant lust as I stealthily tried to part Marty from his treasure. Marty was and is extremely generous--but no fool. He and his gentian couldn't be parted. "Where on earth did you get that, Marty?" The NARGS seed exchange--doh! I probably have copies of all the NARGS seed exchange booklets from the 1980's--finding them is another matter. Perhaps some assiduous researcher one day can verify that 1) there was an offering of this in the mid 1980's and 2) a few years later (he had to have time to germinate and grow the thing to flowering after all) I pounced on an offering later in the decade--just a few months after Marty showed me his plant as a matter of fact! I believe the seed was offered by Gerd Bohme--an East German rock gardener with whom I traded seed for decades--only I'd stopped exchanging with him about this time and would get his offerings off the NARGS exchange instead. I could be wrong about the latter inference, but everything else I've averred in this piece is as true as the day is long or as most gentians are true blue.

The real point of this article is that you can obtain remarkable treasures from the Seed Exchange of the North American Rock Garden Society: and it's not too late to order (you have to join first--do that here: JOIN NARGS. As soon as your membership registers, you can get on the website and order lots of seeds for a ridiculously cheap price. Easy peasy!

For completeness, I reprinted the text of my plant portrait I wrote about Gentiana paradoxa 31 years ago. Time flies when you're having fun (or growing gentians). AFTER that, I shall end with a poetic coda--a paean to the Exchange that you're not apt to get to unless you are a true plant geek. Or my soul-brother or sister: in which case I thank you!

Text below of my Plant Portrait of Gentiana paradoxa published in the Fall 1992 issue of the Rock Garden Quarterly of NARGS. The plant was featured on the cover--an exquisite watercolor by my good friend Rob Proctor [the original painting also happens to grace the wall of my bedroom]:

If some terrible catastrophe were to befall your garden, and you had time to rescue only a handful of plants, you might pick the ones you couldn't easily replace, like double trilliums, or those with some sentimental association. I would probably include Gentiana paradoxa on my short list, for this sprightly gentian has earned my love and my respect. I first discovered this plant on the pages of the Red Book of endangered plants of the former Soviet Union. These depicted a grassy-leaved gentian (suggesting an alliance to the Frigida group of eastern Asia) growing from a taproot (like the Pneumonanthe group found all over the Northern Hemisphere). Of course, I didn't really expect to run across this plant—it is, after all, restricted to only a few streamsides in the Caucasus. You can imagine my surprise one September day when Marty Jones of Colorado Alpines brought a fine specimen of this gentian in a pot to a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Chapter and asked me what I knew about it. It only had a few flowers and two or three stems 10" tall, but the grassy leaves and fantastically lacy plicae were even lovelier than I'd imagined. Marty had grown it from seed he'd obtained from a rock garden society seed exchange-one more reminder of riches I myself overlook in the mad scramble to return seed requests. Like so many rare plants in nature, this distinctive gentian is utterly adaptable to garden conditions. Since a single plant produces thousands of seeds annually within a few years of planting, I suspect it will soon become a garden stalwart. How sad that so many nurseries are growing chary of propagating plants inflicted with the incubus of rarity, since once a plant like this enters cultivation, any pressure on wild populations by horticulturists is removed. Gentiana paradoxa grows in a sunny patch near Kirengeshoma palmata and other woodlanders at Denver Botanic Gardens, in a peat bed alongside Scleranthus uniflorus and heathers in another garden, and alongside Himalayan androsaces and Bolax at the base of a scree bed at our home. I would be hard pressed to say which conditions suit the plant best—it looks and blooms well under all these conditions. It seems to grow as quickly and easily from seed as its close relative Gentiana septemfida and comes into bloom just as its cousin finishes, making a fine bridge to the autumnal Asiatics. To me gentians suggest prismatic windows leading to a truer, bluer world, and this recent, elegant introduction is proving to be a permanent and indispensible part of my gardens. Nowadays it's on every seedlist and in more and more nursery catalogs. Don't leave your home without it. 

Sentimental Coda:

I am reasonably sure not too many people have trudged through all that recondite posturing and history to reach this point in this blog post--wherein I shall fantasize and ponder the mystery of seed exchanges: how do we measure the minutes of our lives? I do so in measurable amounts--the hundreds of books I possess (thousands actually) and yes, I have read most of them. I measure the tens of thousands of Chinese characters I looked up painstakingly for the better part of a decade in Matthew's ponderous lexicon--memorizing hundreds of radicals and counting the the strokes of each phonetic component for who knows how many pages of text. Ditto for my dead-end attempt to be a Classics scholar--all those pages of Liddell and Scott's dictionary I turned to look up countless words in Plato's (or should it be Socrates'?) Apology not to mention the Iliad, and on and on--the countless lexical exercises in all the Spanish novels and books I studied, and a half dozen other language attempts. 

Not all my pursuits have been so high brow: I haven't always shunned Television: like most humans I can count countless episodes of various serials over the decades starting with You Bet Your Life with Groucho and a half dozen I watched with my beloved sister and her husband in Boulder like Hill Street Blues and Columbo and lots more. Gilligan's Island and Sanford and Sons. And even later--although T.V. has gradually diminished in my life (Plenty of episodes of Friends and Seinfeld notwithstanding). Movies have been more constant from my childhood (I saw Psycho when I was in single digits of age--and permanently scarred: I detest physical violence in movies or "real life" as a consequence)--but we persist in movie going: it was wonderful during COVID when we were often the only two in the whole theater!..and let's not forget a lifetime full of plays (I watched the very first performance of Midsummer Night's Dream as a child that launched the C.U. Shakespeare festival). In recent years, we've added Opera--both the movie-Met and in actual theatres--to our activities...so many ways to measure the ticking of our minutes. One can count the meals and the myriad noddings off--lots of methods to gauge the finite segments of the tiny slice existence we've been granted which ends only too soon!

Seed cleaning, sorting, packaging, peering through Index Semina, catalogs and ESPECIALLY the NARGS seed exchange--which I have contributed to and ordered from for well nigh half a century. The complicated ballet performed by our mind as we skim a seedlist, the imaging of where the seed came from, how we will grow it, where to put it...multiplied hundreds (in my case thousands) of times! These intricate dance steps eventually evolve into that pastoral ballet we call a garden. (And let's not even bring up the splintery fragments of time we spend weeding, primping and otherwise cosseting said gardens!)

The vast mosaic of a little human life is pieced together with a trillion such tiny tesserae, much as our bodies represent the extraordinary concert of trillions of cells--truly a miracle we rarely acknowledge. 

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The strange story told in this Blog post about Gentiana paradoxa raises as many questions for me as it addresses:  How truly rare is this plant in nature? Is there much variability in the plant over its pretty extensive range shown in the Red Book? Has a white flowered form manifested itself yet? Would this gentian have attained such wide distribution in cultivation had not Gerd (or whoever donated the seed) not donated it to the NARGS exchange? And would I have ever grown it if Marty Jones hadn't succeeded in growing a single plant? What I have not shared so far is that after I got seed in the late 1980's, we grew it extremely well in our rock garden at Eudora Street and we collected large quantities of seed we sold through Rocky Mountain Rare Plants--a seed company technically operated by Gwen Moore (my ex-wife now, then my wife and close collaborator on all plant projects). I was, however, the prime collector, seed cleaner for that business we devised as a potential escape from my (at that time) oppressive work at Denver Botanic Gardens that was going through a difficult phase of bad politics as it transitioned from being a city agency to becoming an N.G.O. Gwen did do the catalog, and most of the fulfillment--don't get me wrong. But I selected and collected the seeds of the plants in our garden: a bounty of seed that we sold worldwide for years: I a hunch that most all of the plants in cultivation right now derive from Rocky Mt. Rare Plants. But I can't prove it (alas). Our wild seed collections were truly a joint effort--and some of the sunniest portions of our 23 year marriage that I do not regret one iota.

Multiply this story by several tens of thousands of plants--and you have perhaps a log of the largest and most gratifying portion of my work life at least. 

Footnote: there is a pretty dazzling (and somewhat irritating) website [they don't sell seed to the USA and show the Scottish Rock Garden Club emblem but NOT NARGS's Dodecatheon on their web pages to enumerate two things that annoyed me] that has a super piece on Gentiana paradoxa that includes the following extremely interesting paragraph: "Records show that Gentiana paradoxa was named by Russian botanist Nikolai Michailovic Albov in 1894 from specimens collected on the calcareous slopes of Mt. Kherebet Mamdzyhkhara, Abkhazia at 1300 m altitude (various spellings, Mt. Mamdzyshkha)." The photograph on I-Naturalist seems to corroborate the "calcareous" assertion in the quote above. Which may explain why the species does so well in Colorado gardens--which generally have high pH. Of course almost all the literature about the species claims it is calciphobe and needs acid soil--the typical way garden writing generally makes crap up and then repeats the lies ad nauseum.

Will I live long enough to go to Abkhazia and visit Mt. Kherebet or one of the other sites where the gentian grows? Not likely. But then when I wrote the piece in 1992, would I have believed I'd have gone to San Francisco, Philadelphia (twice), New Orleans, Uzbekistan, Kansas City, Nova Scotia, Sikkim and India, Utah, South Africa, Michigan, Las Vegas and probably a few other places I forgot about in 2023 [with Chicago and Los Angeles looming before the end of 2023]. I only hope the carbon I've expended is one day compensated for by carbon I might have sequestered by the undertow commitments of my life.

By the way, the current NARGS seedlist includes Gentiana paradoxa! As it has for most of the last thirty years. Four years ago I sent in an enormous packet from a garden where it likely still persists--but unfortunately,  I do not know the new owners, although perhaps I should meet them just to get more seed! (https://prairiebreak.blogspot.com/2018/10/valedictory.html)