Category — History of gardening

When Rev. Wilks noticed a different kind of corn poppy in his garden, he decided to save the seed. Unlike most pure-flaming-red corn poppies, this one had a thin white edge.

Year after year, he planted from these seeds, saving more seed from the ones that showed the most unusual colorings and characteristics.

This old way of selecting seed takes time, but it led to the wonderful Shirley poppies, named after Rev. Wilks’s parish in Surrey. (Rev. Wilks also helped create the Shirley foxglove strain, still one of the finest today.)

Since 1880, when Wilks started out,  Shirley poppies have undergone even more transformations.

Originally, they started out as a flower that capitalized on the disturbed ground that farmers created when they sowed grain; that’s why they’re called corn poppies. (In Europe, corn is any grain; what we call corn in the U.S. is called maize in most of the rest of the world.)

The wild Papaver rhoeas is still a symbol for war veterans; in World War I, they filled the fields in southern France, where so many people died.

The poem In Flanders Field says: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row.” Probably in earlier times these flowers had associations with death and resurrection, since they die back every year, then come back so spectacularly from the tiny hard seeds in late spring.

After Wilks created the strain of Shirley poppies, artist Sir Cedric Morris selected his own strain, ‘Mother of Pearl’, from his Shirley poppy seed.

I grew ‘Mother of Pearl’ which has mostly pastel tints, but also reverts to the original red form.

I could use the rainy season to water and grow them, without doing any watering of my own. Papaver rhoeas is a Mediterranean plant, like most spring bulbs and herbs that are popular in the western world.

‘Mother of Pearl’ grew almost chest-high, and lasted a few weeks.

Unfortunately, I can no longer find ‘Mother of Pearl’.

But that’s all right. ‘Falling in Love’, a new introduction to poppy culture, is also quite beautiful, and shares some of ‘Mother of Pearl’s’  pastel traits – as well as their tendency to revert to pure red. All of the pictures in this post are of different versions of ‘Falling in Love’.

All Papaver rhoeas cultivars are excellent low-water plants. They germinate well in cool, rainy weather; I plant them in fall or early winter, and they oblige in late spring and early summer, a few weeks of luminescent bloom. Sometimes, if it’s hot and dry, I give them a little water to encourage them to last longer.

Mixing the tiny seed with dry organic flower fertilizer distributes seed better; I put about a teaspoon of seeds in a handful of fertilizer. Otherwise, I tend to get clumps of short, stunted flowers, and lots of space in between.

Shirley poppies have come so far that the original color combination Rev. Wilks noticed has been reversed.

When my ‘Falling in Love’ poppies finish, I’ll be sure to collect the seed.

I’ll be curious to see what comes of my own seed selection.

One of the reasons I coveted this plant was the memory of some friends here, years ago, who had a beautiful garden. Papaver orientale was one of their volunteer plants; it came up and gave a fine bright display every late spring without any care or watering whatever.

Since I’m easily infatuated by plants that give joy with little or no work from me, I took note. Papaver orientale was a plant to covet; reading catalogues, I found the lovely salmon-pink Victoria Louise, and knew she was it.

I’ve recently found that this casual use of oriental poppy wasn’t original with my friends. In 1874, The Journal of Horticulture, Cottage gardener, and Country Gentlemen said, ‘The double varieties of Papaver orientale, of which there are many colors, are very ornamental, and are useful for sowing in rough corners, where they often make a display without trouble.’

It’s interesting to know there were double versions of this poppy back then; I haven’t seen any modern ones.

But perhaps they are in the phenomenal list of Papaver orientale provided at Plantaholic. Until I read the Plantaholic site, I hadn’t realized there were quite so very many oriental poppy varieties; they have 150 types, and breeders are working all the time, making sturdier stems, longer flowering, and a list of other desirable traits.

To me, the most desirable traits of Papaver orientale are their toughness (a zone range from 3 to 9 helps testify to that), their beauty, and their willingness to bloom freely without extra water from me.  An extra bonus is some of their medicinal qualities; studies   show that Papaver orientale can act as a central nervous system depressant and stimulant; that it’s a sudorific (that means it makes you sweat) and good for heart tumors. (Just a reminder: Papaver orientale is not the poppy that opium comes from. That’s another species, Papaver somniferum.)

Papaver orientale is easy to grow with little or no water because it’s another Mediterranean plant; the Mediterranean has the same rainy winters and dry summers my area does. In its wild form, Papaver orientale is native to northwestern Iran, northeastern Turkey, and the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

According to Digging Dog nursery, the variety ‘Victoria Louise’ goes back to 17th century Armenia. I wasn’t quite sure, though, if they were referring to this cultivar or Papaver orientale in general. It seems to me that there would be much earlier records on Papaver orientale than that, since the Emirates and the Ottoman Empire (which once encompassed all these countries) were plant-mad cultures. Our own garden records are often so eurocentric that they disregard the work of other cultures altogether, so it’s hard to know.

In any case, this western Asian plant has made itself so at home in North America that, in some places, it has naturalized. (I’ve never seen this, but it was on the government botany site, so it must be right, right? Has our government ever lied to us?)

If you get seeds, I would follow nature’s advice and plant them in fall. I was lucky enough to get my plant from a local grower (that means I’m more likely to get a plant that does well in my area); I have such a small garden, I often get only specimens of each plant. It seems silly to buy seeds if I want only one.

Papaver orientale is a tough plant; its zone range testifies to that: zones 3 to 9. It does need some winter chill to do well, so it might have a hard time in climates that get any warmer.

Each flower gave a little extra show; after the petals drop, the puffy almost-furry flower center looks like a flower in itself (a scabiosa on steroids, maybe).

One of the things that helps Papaver orientale be so water-thrifty is its fleshy taproot, which acts both as storage for moisture and a deep-level moisture extractor. I have been known to water poppies if we have a warm spring spell, just so they last longer, but it’s not necessary for plant survival.

The One Stop Poppy Shoppe (more on this below) says that Victoria Louise goes well with rose-red, violet-blue, and soft blue. I also found that it went very nicely in a container with silver-green wormwood (Artemesia absinthium), another plant that needs very little water to thrive (and can survive with none). Both plants also need good drainage, a very common requirement for plants who sail through dry summers without water.

Easy, flashily beautiful, and water-saving: Victoria Louise is a good candidate for a water-saving garden, in containers and out of them.

Poppy bonuses:

One Stop Poppy Shoppe  This link will get you to their multitudinous oriental poppy seed selection, but they have  many species and varieties. Fun to browse.

Sylvia’s black-and-white oriental poppy

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.”)

Lady Jane is a tulip I’ve seen on a lot of blogs, so I know I’m not the only one who enjoys its beautiful, spunky character, and its tendency to return, without any special prima-donna attention.

It seems like such a simple tulip. But there’s a lot of confusion around it.  First of all, it isn’t “the clusiana” tulip. You can find Tulipa clusiana at old-bulb specialists; it has narrower petals, a deeper red coloring, and less white-per-red ratio. It looks like this:

The actual, genuine, real Tulipa clusiana

 Second, Lady Jane isn’t a species tulip. The real Tulipa clusiana  was named after Carolus Clusius, who collected bulbs in Turkey and Spain and became curator at the Leyden botanical garden in the late 1500s -  a time when tulips were just starting to arrive in Europe. T. clusiana, named after him, is a species tulip from Iran. (Its coloring and general shape does make it look as if it’s a likely ancestor for Lady Jane). Clusius got it from a Florentine and brought it to Europe, to great acclaim. It was called the ‘Lady Tulip’ (particularly beautiful flowers were often prefaced with ‘Lady’, referring either to the Christian Virgin Mary or more pagan fertility goddesses or both). This, and the somewhat similar coloring, may be the cause of confusion.

Yep. Another “species” tulip that isn’t, even though you will find them listed as such in many catalogues and websites (why is it “in” catalogues and “on” websites?) According to Brent and Becky’s bulbs, the RGBA lists this tulip as “miscellaneous”, meaning that it’s not in any of the cultivar groups for T. clusiana. (Tulipa clusiana chrysantha is, and since it’s a lot cheaper and easier to keep in the garden than the original T. clusiana, a lot of people know this one.)

The real Lady Jane, in bud

Despite its complicated origins, clothed in obscurity (if anybody knows of a good source for info on this, please say: all my usual ones are stonewalling me. Sheesh. This was supposed to be a quick and easy post, I know this flower) - despite its complicated origins, Lady Jane is an easy, uncomplicated tulip to grow. Its closeness to its origins does mean that it’s good in warmer climates; some say to zone 9, others to zone 8b.  And it returns, and multiplies, always a welcome character trait in someone beautiful. And here’s the real beauty part: it’s cheap. Especially if you buy in quantity. And why not?

Because it’s smaller than the booming garden-variety tulips, Lady Jane’s bulbs are small, too. They can be tucked into little crevices in rocks, pots of low-water plants, or just wherever you have a spare space for this sweetly reliable flower. They give you a lot of bloom, too; mine usually last about a month, opening in staggered rhythm so I have some in bud while others are going all curly.

I’ve read that there are some who don’t like this tulip’s full-on, open stage; they only like the closed-up morning/evening/rain versions.

All tulips spread themselves out every sunny day - the better for pollination, my dear - and I love Lady Jane’s gentle exuberance as much as her quieter, more introspective moments.

As with so many things in life, you don’t have to know everything about Lady Jane to enjoy her.

Digitalis purpurea is the digitalis species with the most venerable medical history, at least in English-speaking cultures. It’s been in gardens since 1440, when it is mentioned in Feate of Gardening (by the well-named John Gardener). In 1636 Gerard mentions it in his Herbal as a medicinal plant.

I would guess that foxglove was in many gardens, and used medicinally, long before.

In 1636,  the educated world didn’t know that foxgloves had medicinal powers. Gerard said they had “…a certaine kinde of clensing qualitie joyned therewith; yet are they of no use, neither have they any place amongst medicines, according to the Antients.”

Among the unlettered holders of knowledge, though, foxglove was probably already in place as a heart remedy. In the hundred years before Gerard, there had been a wholesale murdering of healers and herbalists by the Church. They were called witches and heretics, and were burned at the stake, tortured, drowned. In this way, the Church acquired the accused witches’ property, plus sovereignty over the healing arts, a domain they awarded to the academically trained doctors. The era that we call the Renaisance had its evil side; progress often seems to involve wholesale slaughter. At least in Western European civilization.

Witch-killing still wasn’t over by  1636, so it’s likely that anyone who knew how to use foxglove kept pretty quiet, especially around lettered men, educated in church-run schools. Foxglove was used in ointments or poultices for swellings, old sores, and scrofulous swellings: that use was known.  Though it might not have worked for everybody: some people are sensitive to the touch of foxglove leaves on bare skin, and come up with rashes, headaches, and nausea.

Foxglove’s use internally, as a heart remedy, was for a long time a secret, partly because it was something that took a lot of skill. Foxglove’s active ingredients make the heart constrict and blood pressure rise rapidly. Getting the dose right is essential: if you don’t the patient dies. It’s also tricky: the strength of the active ingredients varies from plant to plant, some people have much higher tolerance to drugs than others, and a person’s individual response varies as fast as internal chemistry, which is to say, from mood to mood. Getting a dose right under such circumstances - and without scientific measuring technology - required skill and insight.

William Withering, an English doctor, seems to have been the first educated man to crack the secret of foxglove. and bring it to the world’s attention. In 1775, a patient of his was afflicted with dropsy (excess fluid retention), often associated with heart and kidney problems. The case had gone too far; Withering could do nothing: he expected his patient to die.

Next post: Miracle cure by foxglove - and a couple of problems along the way