Colchicum in the garden

Jim McKenney jimmckenney@starpower.net
Tue, 07 Sep 2004 18:31:26 PDT
At 08:49 PM 9/7/2004 -0400, Ellen Hornig wrote:

a drift of my fanciest silver-centered blue-leaved Arisaema
consanguineum...something small scale to fill in there  -perhaps Cyclamen
coum, which, as Panayoti Kelaidis once pointed out to me, makes an
excellent interplanting with late emerging arisaemas. 

Wow! Ellen, that sound like something worth the drive up to Oswego to see!

But it probably won't work for me: Cyclamen coum rots here during the
summer unless it has very sharp drainage (hardly what I think of as
Arisaema conditions), and the forms of Arisaema consanguineum I have
somehow seem ill at ease under my conditions - as if they were looking for
a way out. 

On the other hand, in mentioning the Sedum you've touched on one of my
current enthusiasms. For several years now I've been collecting Sedum of
the pleuricaule-cauticola-lidakense (or whatever)-sieboldii-Vera
Jameson-Bertram Anderson sorts. These plants, with their blue-gray foliage
and pink and red flowers, are serenely harmonious with themselves,
interesting early in the year before the new growth has grown out very
much, and to my tastes very elegant in an understated way. And they would
be ideal for use with big Colchicum (I have not done it yet). For small
Colchicum there are several tiny blue foliaged sorts (as I recall, Alpine-L
had a thread on this topic earlier this year). 

So thanks, Ellen, for pointing us in this direction. 

Jim McKenney
jimmckenney@starpower.net
Montgomery County, Maryland, USA, USDA zone 7, where for years I wrote
Sedum cauticolum, not realizing that cauticola was a noun with its own
gender.  


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