Category — Heirloom plants

There’s something about clary. A luminescence in the way the sun catches the flowers. An appeal to the deeply-vein-carved fuzzy leaves.  And it’s an obliging plant; it’ll put on a show under almost any circumstances.

If you grow clary sage in native clay dirt, it will hang in and produce tough little plants that need no extra watering to survive. But the richer the soil, the more the water, the bigger and lusher they get; I’ve seen them at least three times the size of more poorly-fed ones, and fairly pulsing with green and silver.

If you have a limited water supply, and can’t or don’t want to amend your soil, it’s good to know the plants that will survive under those conditions. Clary sage is one of them. It’ll even grow in semi-shade, though it much prefers sun. The only places it won’t do well are full shade and boggy undrained sites.

Part of what gives the flower that luminescence, I think, comes from the different colors and textures involved. This closeup shows bracts and bi-colored flower

and this really close shot shows how the pink-purple of the bracts contrasts with the violet-purple (and white) of the flowers in a way that somehow blends to a light-filled haze when you back off from the plant.

Clary sage’s name supposedly originates from “clear eye”, which comes from using the seeds to take irritating stuff out of the eyes. Like chia seeds, clary seeds are covered with a mucilaginous coating that puffs up into a gel when moistened; this probably allowed the offending item to attach itself and get removed. Or  maybe the mucilage is soothing in itself, I don’t know. Culpepper (a 17th century English herbalist who made it his mission to get herbal knowledge out of the hands of the leeches and into the heads of the common folk) claims that making the mucilage into a kind of compress relieved swellings and tumors, and drew out splinters and thorns.  The leaves also have anti-inflammatory properties and, judging by the fact that he recommends them for “hot inflammations” (probably infections) they may be antiseptic as well.

I haven’t used clary for any of the purposes Culpepper recommends, but I’ve used clary medicinally in an informal way for years. One winter I had a bad case of flu. I wanted soup, but I didn’t want to go out and shop, so I had to figure out something with what I had. What I had was potatoes and clary sage plants, the only substantial green leaves still out there. I picked a couple, thinking that their hairiness wouldn’t make them much of a treat.

But I was wrong. The leaves cooked up tender and sweet, and flavored the potatoes beautifully; all I added was salt. And I swear I felt better after I ate that soup. I always eat it when I’m sick, and I always feel better after. Clary sage leaves are available all year round in my climate, although they taste better before the plant flowers.

Probably clary sage’s most famous medicinal use is in aromatherapy, where it’s recommended for creating relaxed euphoria. Many years ago I put that knowledge to good use; I was splitting up with a boyfriend I’d been living with, and as I made trips back and forth for my stuff, I sometimes had to work around the woman who was now living with him. I had planted clary sage in the garden, and it was in flower. I ran in to sniff some on one occasion, and, well, it worked. It was a friend to me in a time of sorrow, or at least severe humiliation.

Tastes differ, however, and so do senses of smell. While some people find clary sage’s scent resinous and musky, to others it smells like dirty socks and old sweat. These people are not likely to be soothed by the smell of clary sage. What’s your own response?

Insulinde is a broken tulip – a modern version of the tulips which brought many a person to financial ruin, and caused a breeding frenzy in the Netherlands which was probably the beginning of its tulip industry today.

The story of broken tulips could (and does) take up entire books. These were the ones which caused the famous Tulipomania, the huge run on tulip stock that had Hollanders trading horses and wagons, houses and breweries, for a single bulb. Poorer people bought shares of tulip futures in pubs that catered to the tulip stock market.

No one knew what made some of the tulips break. Since the broken ones were the most valuable and desirable, everyone tried whatever they could to get their tulips to break. Pigeon dung, secret spells, burying bulbs at midnight under a fruit tree.

Because they were so valuable, broken tulips acquired their own market-driven categories, separate from and superior to the others. There were Rosen, red or pink tulips with a white ground; Violetten, purple or lilac on white; and Bizarden: red, purple, or brown on yellow. In the nineteenth century, when a lot of botanical nomenclature was becoming more like the modern type we know, broken tulips still had their own peculiar classification; the only difference was that the former Violetten were now called Byblomen.

By the turn of the twentieth century, when Rev. Joseph Jacobs (a man after my own heart) was stuffing five hundred types of tulips in his rectory garden, people were beginning to suspect that breaking was caused by some sort of disease. Some breeders began trying to eliminate broken tulips from their stock, because broken tulips were smaller and more sickly and made the rest of the stock the same way. Writing in 1912, Jacob describes a letter from E. Gadeceau, a grower in Nantes. M. Gadeceau said he was more and more convinced that broken tulips were “like degenerate or sick Darwins, as it pleases you” (my translation).

He was right. Breaking is caused by a virus carried by the peach potato aphid, which thrives in warm situations surrounded by fruit trees. Turns out those people burying their bulbs at midnight under a fruit tree were right,  too.

While Jacob called broken tulips Rembrandts, he didn’t mean what catalogues mean today when they talk of Rembrandt tulips. What we call Rembrandts now are the thickly streaked ones like Marilyn, World Impresion, Prinses Irene, and others. While fetching, they don’t have anything like the intricacy that true broken tulips have. One of the names Jacob used for broken tulips reflects how they were valued: “rectified” tulips.

Jacob had yet another category to add to the list of broken tulips: Florist’s tulips, often called English tulips today. These tulips were a subset of broken tulips which had been taken over by English breeders, and given a very strict set of standards. (England was awash in plant-breeding societies in the 1800s. Many of the members were working people who bred amazing primroses, roses, tulips, and other plants in their time off . Many of these societies still exist, including the one for English tulips.) Not unnaturally, Jacob considers these the finest of all tulips, better than the Rembrandts, and when you look at pictures of them – well, you can make a case for it.

Insulinde, like most broken tulips, is smaller than the modern tulips we are used to . The first flowering of my bulb was a bloom about the size of a medium egg, and the stem was  less than a foot high (about a third of a meter).

Broken tulips aren’t cheap – the ones I’ve bought have been about $15 to $20 for one bulb – and they aren’t easy (they are diseased, after all). They are especially susceptible to what’s going around, and since they are small, I have found them to be some of the first candidates for burning up and drying out in a heat wave. You also need to plant them separately, so other tulips won’t get diseased. I put mine in small, deep pots. This way you can also be sure to get them out of the way of summer water, which is so damaging to tulips.

So if broken tulips are this much trouble, why bother with them? Because they are so amazing. When you look at one side of a broken tulip, the pattern is subtly different from the other side.

When Insulinde first bloomed, I had never seen anything in the plant world like the loops and whorls and dark and light patches and the faint hints of other colors that decorated this tulip and changed each day. I began to understand how people could become obsessed with such tulips. (Well, it wasn’t a very long step for me, was it?)

The following year, I had a smaller bloom from Insulinde, and then my tulip split into offsets and went blind. I have four small bulbs now, and this year I got another, smaller bloom, about the size of a walnut in its shell. It has the same amazing patterning of the first, with variations. I’m looking forward to seeing all of those little offsets grow out. And I can’t help thinking that it would be interesting to try putting them in with other tulips, to see if I can create my own degenerate Darwins.
(For more on antique tulips, visit the English tulips pictures link above, or check out Hortus Bulborum, the place Old House Gardens (where I got Insulinde) calls “the Noah’s Ark of bulbs.”)

When is a species tulip not a species tulip? When it’s a batalinii.

Actually, there are quite a few “species” tulips living under false names out there, but it’s not my job to blow their cover. Only to report that Apricot Jewel is a cross between the wild Tulipa batalinii and another species tulip, Tulipa maximoviczii, made by W.R. Dykes in the late 1800s. It made its way to what was then and now is again St. Petersburg (there’s an old, long-traveled route between the middle east and Russia that goes back to Genghis Khan). A Dr. Batalin, director of the botanic gardens there, sent it to Kew.  I’m not sure if it acquired his name there or later, but this middle eastern tulip now has a Russian name.

I first saw Tulipa batalinii in a pose similar to the one at the top of the post. It was on the cover of a garden book, and I knew that I wanted it.

While I’m generally in favor of trying pure species first, so I get a feel for where a tulip comes from, I didn’t know enough to work this out when I first got Apricot Jewel. And I’m glad. What I got was a graceful, beautiful flower, with narrow leaves and a flower small enough to fit into the woodland scene without sticking out, but large enough to show up against that woodland background.

Apricot Jewel starts out a clear orange-yellow, then gradually turns to a pale peach-orange. As it ages, you’ll sometimes see feathery red picotee edgings

or red streaks in the petals.

Sometimes it bypasses the flashy colors, and fades into a pale, green-accented peach. Like all tulips, Apricot Jewel is variable, according to the weather, soil, and its own fine whims.

It’s a long-lasting tulip; Apricot Jewel can go a month if the weather’s right. And it will turn up for you every year, unless you do something drastic. Unlike most of my tulips, I planted it in containers that I water in summer. Not much; its cyclamen and alpine strawberry and thyme compaions don’t take much watering, but they do take some. Apricot Jewel does fine with this, an exception to my Don’t Water Tulips in Summer rule (they still need drainage, though).

Occasionally I buy more Apricot Jewel, even though the ones I got over ten years ago are still with me. (I’m not sure if they’re multiplying; I don’t count them.) And occasionally I try its sisters, which make different play of the colors in Apricot Jewel, appearing in yellows and rusty-rosy reds. So far, I like Apricot Jewel best.

Reference:

Anna Pavord, The Tulip, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999

Now that the Annie Schilder has come out again  I’m remembering why I ordered rafts of it, three years ago. The subtle glowing-ember flames out in a changing show as the flower matures – and as an extra bonus,  Annie Schilder is fragrant.

Since I’ve had a good repeat showing from these bulbs the past two years, I deduce that it’s one of the easier ones to perennialize. As most people know, it’s not always easy to perennialize tulips, especially not Triumph tulips, which Annie Schilder is. Very likely that’s because Annie Schilder is an heirloom tulip, dating from 1923, when they made things to last.

Annie Schilder’s fragrance is somewhere between the faint spring hint of Apricot Beauty and the heavy musk cloud of Generaal de Wet. You may have noticed that these fragrant tulips are all orange. There’s probably some genetic reason that scented tulips are mostly orange – and I haven’t listed them all.  Prinses Irene, orange with purple flames, is another of the fragrant tulips. (I suspect the deep-orange species Tulipa whittalii in the background, but that’s just a guess.)

There are fragrant tulips which aren’t orange, and probably have different backgrounds. I collect fragrant tulips; if you’ve grown any,  I’d be interested to know which ones.

Besides her scent, Annie Schilder puts on quite a visual show. OK, I know I’ve recently gone on record as saying I don’t thrill to straight-ahead yellows and oranges in my garden. (See my blog mission statement (at the bottom of the linked page) for an explanation.) But to my eyes, Annie Schilder is a little more subtle than that. She starts out a burning-embers deep orange.

 As the tulip ages, the color lightens, with brushes of yellow in the orange, as in the photograph at the top of the page, and as this sunlit picture below.

The colors get more distinct as it fades and swirls out.

And now it’s time to bid goodbye to Annie Schilder for another year

‘Daydream’ opens in a single bright color, and matures into a softer, deeper pallette – just the way I would like to do.

The original color is described by Brent and Becky’s as “sunny yellow”. To me, it has a little bit of the taxicab or crayon (if you look closely, you can see flecks of color, hints of what’s to come):

Within a day, the hints of color turn into downright statements. A faint red picotee edge appears on the edge of the petals, and a flush of apricot orange starts to suffuse the flower.

The older blooms become even deeper and more thoroughly orange, although there’s still something of a blush sensation when you look to the heart of the petals.

In a few days, there’s a distinct contrast between the newly-opened blooms, and the ones that have been around for awhile.

Besides the color show, Daydream gives us scent: I detect a faint, light sweetness from this tulip, especially the ones which have just opened. (Scent is part of the strategy for attracting pollination, so it often dissipates or changes its nature after pollination occurs.)

I thought all this mutation was a modern invention, but Daydream actually qualifies as an heirloom tulip; it was first grown by van Tubergen in 1952.

While the final stage of Daydream is said to be pale apricot, it’s really more of a fading sunset, which gets more translucent as it ages, going back to just about the shade it was when it first colored up.

I’ve enjoyed the show, but to be honest, Daydream, as a friend of mine said recently, is a little too primary-color for me (although that’s not quite right, since orange is a secondary color. I guess I just mean the colors feel too straight-ahead to me).  But I’m glad I satisfied my curiosity and grew Daydream. It’s an intriguing flower-invention, and shows one of the main tulip characteristics: a willingness to mutate, and turn into something else.