Pins, Thrums and Promiscuous Primulae
At the moment the shop greenhouse at the nursery is full of primroses and polyanthus. We sell them by the box - 20 for £12 - and even individually, they’re only 75p. Child’s pocket money, for flowers the colours of sweets in a jar.
But my favourite of our stock is Primula veris ‘Little Queen Red’. It’s a deep red, almost black flower, fringed with dark yellow borders. In centuries gone by, this was known as a ‘gold-laced’ form. Primulae of this kind were first popular almost 500 years ago. Elizabethan and Jacobean gardeners had a passion for anything out of the ordinary by way of primrose flowers, and adored the genetic mutations that produce strange and unusual effects. It’s for this reason that that modern primrose terminology has a Shakespearean flavour to it. We talk of ‘Gallygaskins’ and ‘Jack-in-the-Green,’ or ‘Jackanapes’ and ‘Hose-in-Hose’ primulae. Primulae whose petals are edged with a contrasting colour to the main petal are known as ‘laced’ primulae. This term evokes the Elizabethan meaning of the word ‘lace,’ which refers to a strip of fabric used as fastening (as in ‘shoe-lace’) or as a decorative edging, rather than the intricate patterns of looped threads we think of as ‘lace’ today.
‘Little Queen Red’ is, according to Florensis, very close to the wild cowslips - primula veris - from which it was bred, and it has the same delicate form. In his 1629 work Paradisi in Sole, the writer John Parkinson includes an illustration of a hose-in-hose cowslip, and comments that March brings with it flowers including ‘some sorts of French Cowslips, both tawney, murry, yellow and blush’. ‘Murry’ or ‘murray’ is a seventeenth-century dye colour, a dark red-purple, exactly like the colour of our ‘Little Queen Red’. So, although it’s not an old variety, it is very like what gardeners have been growing for centuries.
Fancy primulae go in and out of fashion. The garden writer Reginald Farrer writes, waspishly, that ‘the passion for Hose-in-hose, Jacks-in-the-green and Galligaskins has passed away, or survives here and there as a curiosity’: he believed that ‘such deformities’ of flowers were ‘of more precarious life than even the fashion that cherished them’. Farrer appears as a walk-on character in Sandra Lawrence’s fascinating biography of plantswoman Ellen Willmott, where he contributes similarly snobbish and provocative comments concerning his female colleagues. It’s amusing to find, with the benefit of hindsight, that Farrer was quite wrong to think these old-fashioned primulae would fade out of horticulturalists’ sights: over the twentieth and twenty-first century breeders have carefully reconstructed and revived them.
But his dismissive comment on the ‘precarious life’ of these flowers is an interesting one. Primulae are well-known to be ‘promiscuous’ plants: they will hybridise with cheerful abandon, wild cowslips and oxlips mixing with wild primroses to form ever-more colourful combinations. In fact, primulae have evolved a neat way of ensuring the genetic diversity of their species. Primula flowers come in two distinct (though very similar-looking) forms. There are pin-form flowers, in which the anthers are hidden and the stigma is visible as a tiny dot at the centre of the petals. And there are thrum-form flowers, in which it is the anthers that are visible and the stigma that is hidden underneath: instead of a tiny pin, you will see a tiny bunch of filaments at the centre of the flower. Because each plant only carries one type of flower - pin or thrum - it fertilises best with another plant carrying the opposite type of flowers, and is unlikely to pollinate itself. Primulae seek out ways to create new colours and forms: they evolved to be different.
Primroses are also prone to mutations (which cause effects like the hose-in-hose flower or the enlarged green sepals of ‘Jacks-in-the-green’). In research carried out over many years, Dr Margaret Webster and her colleagues have also found that, often, these mutations are genetically dominant: this is a species that actively likes to throw up surprises. There’s something lovely in the exuberance of primulae in all their whorls and ripples of petals, their splashes and clashes of colour, which catch the mood of spring bursting into life.
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Vertigrow Plant Nurseries, Lawnswood House, Malton Road, York, YO32 9TL