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The Plant Lover's Guide to Primulas (The Plant Lover’s Guides)
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About The Plant Lover's Guide To Primulas
Product Description Primulas are available in a huge variety of colors—from subtle pales to shocking oranges—and shapes—from small varieties perfect for borders to long-stem candelabras. The Plant Lover’s Guide to Primulas, by nursery owners Jodie Mitchell and Lynne Lawson, offers insight into the 100 best varieties of garden primulas. Featuring information on growth, care, and design, along with suggested companion plants and hundreds of gorgeous color photographs, it covers everything a home gardener needs to introduce these delightful plants into their garden. Review “If you wanted a good general book on primulas, look no further. This is the one to buy!” — Primula World From the Back Cover Primulas are so much more than just brightly colored bedding plants. The older varieties of polyanthus are perfect for spring mixed borders, and the long-stemmed candelabra primulas add beauty to waterside and bog gardens. Then there are small alpine species suitable for rock gardens and the infinitely collectible auriculas. Lynne Lawson and Jodie Mitchell of the famed Barnhaven Primroses nursery share their secrets for growing this diverse group and suggest the best varieties for every garden. The Plant Lover’s Guide books offer a rich source of information on both new and classic garden plants. Written by enthusiastic experts, they recommend the best varieties for different situations, inspire ideas for new plant combinations, and are packed with resources for the home gardener. These gorgeous guides celebrate the beauty of each plant and form a comprehensive library that every plant lover will want to own. About the Author Along with her mother, Jodie Mitchell operates world-famous Barnhaven Primroses, now located in northwestern France. Holder of a National Plant Collection for Barnhaven strains and a certified collection of Primula auricula cultivars, the nursery continues the 80-year-old tradition of hand pollination begun by Florence Bellis in the United States, carefully maintaining the breeding lines she developed. Breeding new varieties of hardy primroses and maintaining rare species and cultivars in cultivation is a vital part of work in the nursery. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction: The Barnhaven Story—Something of a Fairy Tale In the Great Depression of the 1930s in Oregon, a young concert pianist called Florence Bellis was out of work, ill, and destitute. She found refuge, with her two pianos and husband, in an old barn, without running water or electricity but surrounded by a wonderful creek area and an old apple orchard with good, rich soil. It was a haven for Florence—hence the name Barnhaven. As well as the pianos, she had brought with her some trays of seedling primroses. In a friend’s English catalogue, she had seen some pictures of primroses and had fallen in love with them. With her last five dollars, as the story goes, she had ordered several packets of Suttons polyanthus seed from England. At the time she had never read a garden book, never even grown a plant, but she did have a “naïve, absolute confidence” and went on to embark on a hybridizing programme that transformed the primula world and made horticultural history. At that time there was a very limited colour range in polyanthus. Florence’s first list in 1939 offered just scarlet, crimson, orange, yellow, and white (and she forgot to include the prices). She was an instinctive plant breeder, obsessed by colour, and she went on to introduce the first true blues and pinks, which caused a sensation, and literally hundreds of other identifiable colour shades. She concentrated too on fragrance and form and described Barnhaven’s hallmark as “a triad of colour, lilting grace, with overtones of fragrance.” She was the first to hand-pollinate primroses commercially, and that practice is continued at Barnhaven today. She had no idea how to do it, so simply started by taking the flowers apart an
