Meconopsis
BY WAYNE WINTERROWD
IT HAPPENS OFTEN TO CHILDREN—and sometimes to gardeners—that they are given gifts the value of which they do not perceive until much later. That is how it was with my first meconopsis. Seventeen years ago, when my garden in Vermont was so young that it was really only a nursery, I visited a very good gardener in New Hampshire. It was spring, and his garden, enviably long-established, was at its peak of vernal beauty. We walked about in that happy conjunction of need and generosity that all gardeners know, I admiring and he digging. My cardboard box was almost full of roots, slips, and young plants when we came to the stream that flows through his garden. He bent over a patch of mousy, furred, upturned gray leaves and said, “This is the very best thing. You have to have it.”
It was Meconopsis betonicifolia, and he must have wondered why I did not immediately fall to my knees. Maybe he wondered, too, whether my ignorance made a waste of his gift. His instructions (repeated twice, as one does with children) were in any case very clear. “Divide it into single crows with a bit of root when you get home. Plant them firmly just at the crown, like strawberries, in rich decayed leaf mold. Bright dappled light. Maybe some morning sun. But pinch out the first flower bud. You must pinch out the first flower bud.”
All those first steps were easy, and each single crown caught and flourished in the cool bed I had made them beside my own little stream. The first summer they made foot-wide rosettes of oval, dullish blue, hairy leaves, nice enough, but hardly to be treasured like the lusty hosta ‘Royal Standard,’ or the dusty pink, intensely fragrant Viola odorata that had also been in the box. They lived through a cold winter (I was to learn that they love that sort of thing), and the following spring each developing plant clasped a round, fat, furry bud in its center. By then I had discovered something of what I possessed, for I was keyed to the name whenever it appeared in books, as one is when an unfamiliar plant is out in the garden.
I learned that Meconopsis betonicifolia is the fabled Himalayan blue poppy (a blue poppy: words alone enough to shiver over), that it is to all other garden flowers what a milk-white unicorn might be in a barnyard, and that it is the envy of gardeners the world over. I read in T. H. Everett’s Encyclopedia of Gardening that “in most parts of America these plants are difficult or impossible to grow,” and in Wyman’s Gardening Encyclopedia that it “always makes a great impression on American tourists, for it is practically unknown in most parts of the U.S.” In The Education of a Gardener, Russell Page comments that its culture is “as ardently worked for and … as difficult to succeed with as the philosopher’s stone,” and in Green Thoughts, Eleanor Perényi whines wistfully that she “would give anything for a glimpse of it, even in somebody else’s garden.” And there it was, this nonpareil, in thriving health, in my garden.
And it was about to bloom there, for the first time. “But pinch out the first flower bud. You must…” my friend had commented, and there was no ambiguity in his twice-repeated command. As a gardener of fifty years’ experience (albeit meconopsisless for all but the last third) I am used to ruthlessness with plants. I can nip out the first hopeful blooms of annuals, and mess up their roots as well, knowing that it will be better for us both later on. I have plunged a butcher’s knife into the hearts of magnificent clivias and agapanthus, prying their growth apart with a crunch at their crowns and trimming off their white, fleshy roots as one would cut up servings of baked noodles. I have beheaded ancient lilacs, hoary with lichens, so their youth could return to them. I am inured to these acts of violence, but to pinch out those first buds of Meconopsis betonicifolia, when even Eleanor Perényi “would give anything for a glimpse…”?
Fortunately, in the nick (so to speak) of time, I met H. Lincoln Foster at a meeting of the Berkshire Chapter of the American Rock Garden Society. Then old and very ill, he was still tending Millstream, his garden in southern Connecticut, and his authority as one of America’s greatest gardeners hung about him like a fine, comfortable robe. He explained that meconopsis capable of becoming perennials will expend everything, when they are young seedlings or divisions, on their first flower. They then become “monocarpic” (as many of their tribe always are), fading away after bloom like any common biennial foxglove. But if that first flower is pinched out, some (not all) will settle down to form crowns and persist from year to year as true perennials. “So,” he said, “if it is really betonicifolia that you have” (as opposed to a dozen other names he reeled off, and I was later to learn, of true biennials, which will be that whatever you do) “you had better pinch.”
There it was for a second time, delivered with authority beyond question. And though I confess that in life generally, when faced with a choice between immediate, spendthrift pleasure and careful prudence, I have always tended to take the grasshopper’s way, still, to have in my garden such a plant, and to know that one gesture of delayed gratification, one tiny painful pinch, would mean years of perenniality, years of returning pleasure … years of unweening pride and smug superiority and the most heartfelt sadness at the bad fortunes of other gardeners … well, I pinched. I even smothered down the waffling thought that as I had five plants, perhaps then I could pinch only four, and from one at least see this glory straightaway, though I cost it its life.
It is lucky that I began with Meconopsis betonicifolia, because within its genus of about forty-five species, it is the easiest to grow and, when forced to it, the most reliably perennial. And though within its family three or four first cousins vie with it for the title, it is arguably the most beautiful. In its second spring after pinching, it will produce several knots of growth from a central crown, most of which form buds and eventually flowers on stems 4 feet high. Each stem is crowned with one magnificent nodding bloom about 3 inches across, and two to four smaller ones lower down the stem. Petals are usually four, though quite curiously, cultivated plants may bear flowers with six or more petals, a phenomenon never reported in the wild. True doubling, however, seems never to occur, and that is a good thing, as there is a grace about the carriage of the flowers, an almost Tanagra figurine poise, that would only be ruined by too much heavy petal.
Those who can grow the plant at all are quite snobbish about the color, which at its very best is a clear sky blue almost impossible to imagine when not standing before it. Either because of the provenance of collected seed, however, or—as some speculate—because of the alkalinity or dryness of the soil in which they are grown, plants can produce flowers in a range of color from weaker, more watered blue to mauve and even light brownish-purple. A perfectly blue flower is, one supposes, to be preferred over any other; but in fact, there are no ugly Meconopsis betonicifolia, and those that veer furthest from the purest tint do so by washes of one color over another, creating, in their own way, a curious effect of translucence. I even grew—from seed collected by Dan Hinkley on an expedition to Nepal three years ago—a single plant with flowers of deep grape purple. Alas, that one I didn’t pinch, and I still wonder whether it might have been the only one of its color ever brought to the Western world or, indeed, the only one that ever existed at all.
For a plant of such celebrity, Meconopsis betonicifolia is of surprisingly recent introduction, having been brought to England as seed by Frank Kingdon-Ward from western China in 1924. Graham Stuart Thomas flowered it in his Cambridge garden in 1927, when still, as he says, “a schoolboy” (“It thrilled me beyond measure”). Except for its relatively greater perenniality and its ease of division and increase, it is difficult to explain why it has become the Himalayan blue poppy in most people’s minds, crowding out M. grandis, which ought to have at least an equal share in its distinctions. In the privileged gardens where perennial meconopsis thrive at all, it is the elder, having been brought to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh as early as 1895, though the first flowers it produced there were a disappointment, described as a “dull portish-red,” very bad form indeed for a meconopsis. Later introductions from Sikkim provided flowers of the correct, splendid satin blue, carried, as Graham Stuart Thomas has remarked, “like lampshades” atop sturdy, 4-foot stems. Given the conditions that all meconopsis require—deep leaf-moldy soil, abundant moisture at the roots and in the air, perfect drainage, protection from scorching sun and drying wind, and, most of all, cool summer nights and brisk, buoyant days—M. grandis can settle down to become reliable perennials, easily divided and replanted just as the leaves show in spring. Given these conditions, huge drifts might be built up. And when in bloom, there would be nothing else to look at.
M. grandis will also freely intermarry with M. betonicifolia, producing plants of hybrid vigor and splendid flower color. Progeny from these matings are all grouped under the name Meconopsis × sheldonii, commemorating a Mr. Sheldon of Oxted, Surrey, the first to think of getting the pair together. Scottish, Irish, and northern English gardeners (who can turn meconopsis tricks with their left hands) rave over some of these crosses, such as ‘Branklyn,’ the most vigorous and the tallest of the group, with flowers—saucers, rather—as much as 8 inches across. But the crown of beauty goes to ‘Slieve Donard,’ named after that famous nursery, which is lower in stature and smaller in flower, a good thing, really, as a meconopsis is not a dahlia. For the beauty of its flowers, words run out. A gasp and a wave of the hand must do.
There are other famous crosses between M. grandis and M. betonicifolia—‘Sherriff No. 600,’ ‘Quarriston,’ ‘Archie Campbell,’ ‘Springhill,’ and Mrs. Crewdson’s 1940 Crewdson’s Hybrids—and they are all names to conjure with in the right circles. There is a thrill to be had in visiting the Royal Botanic Garden at Edinburgh at just the right time, when their flowering overlaps. There they are all carefully segregated, but still it would be like running into Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Antinoüs, and the young Marlon Brando on the same street. As all these hybrids must be increased by patient division of their furry crowns in early spring, only eight nurseries in the United Kingdom list them at all, and two (‘Branklyn’ and ‘Springhill’) are to be gotten, if at all, from only one, Ballyrogan Nurseries in Northern Ireland (“by appointment”). Whether they exist in American gardens (which is to say the Pacific Northwest, a sort of meconopsis heaven) I can’t say. Certainly they don’t grow in Vermont (which is to the Pacific Northwest something like the Plaza to Heaven), not just yet. But when next I find myself in Northern Ireland, near The Grange, Ballyrogan, Newtownards, C. Down, N.I. BT23 45D, then I mean to try. Meanwhile, I am content with my one Meconopsis × sheldonii, which, though a good deep blue—actually what one could call a neon blue—might still nod its head even lower before ‘Branklyn’ or ‘Slieve Donard.’
Not all meconopsis are some shade of blue (pure or imperfect) and not all are terribly difficult to grow. By far the easiest is Meconopsis cambrica, the Welsh poppy, which is actually a beautiful plant, though its cheerful colors—citron yellow or orange—and its amiable nature have put it at a disadvantage in its haughty clan. Though generally listed as hardy from zones 9 to 6, it is much sturdier than that, surviving and self-seeding pleasantly here in Vermont. It is the only member of its genus native to Western Europe, and before the introduction of Asian species, its status was a little higher than that of the poor relation it has now. From furred, bright green, 8-inch leaves, many hairy stems arise, each surmounted by a single, nodding bud that splits in half to shake out a crinkled, 2-inch-wide flower. Like most poppies and many anemones, it is a flower of the wind, the slightest breeze causing it to dance, until it drops its petals, in three or four days, to form seed capsules. Unlike its treasured Asian relatives (seed of which must be sown in autumn and carried over the winter with never a check), M. cambrica germinates freely in the garden, so much so that in gardens it really likes, it can become a nuisance. But because of its great charm, it is never such a terrible nuisance. It is easy to grub it out where it is not wanted (it hates, like all Papaveraceae, any disturbance at its roots), and it is often a pleasant surprise to find it poking out of some place where it was not planted. The species is a clear yellow, though the orange variety, ‘Aurantiaca,’ seems so much in its blood that a nice mix of lemons and oranges together will generally occur. There is as well a double-flowered form, ‘Flore Pleno,’ that is nice all by itself, but not mixed with the singles, because then it makes them look as if something is missing.
One other group of meconopsis demands attention from those gardeners who can grow them, not for their flowers, but for their leaves. The love of leaves is perhaps the most refined of gardening pleasures, for most gardeners begin by wanting flowers, and many end up there. Leaves—and their beauty—are, when they are appreciated at all, mere essential accidents on the way to the main thing. It is true that hostas, among usual garden plants, are grown for their foliage, and the flowers, though often quite nice (at least at first), are scornfully clipped away. There are plants as well—connoisseur plants to which one comes eventually—that are leaf-proud, such as Petasites japonicus var. giganteus, the giant Japanese butterbur, or the cream-splashed, oval-leaved Tovaria virginiana ‘Variegata,’ now painfully renamed as part of the genus Fallopia. But to grow anything other than a privet or a pachysandra for its leaves alone seems odd to many gardeners. Especially odd in a meconopsis.
Still, both Meconopsis paniculata and M. napaulensis will stop you dead in your tracks on an autumn stroll through the garden, when they are not in flower and not in blue. That is, they will if you garden where Asian meconopsis thrive and you grow them. Both natives of the high elevations of Nepal and western China, they are inured to life-threatening cold, which they seem almost to require for survival. Their built-in blankets would else go to waste. M. napaulensis is thickly fleeced with silver over lettuce-green leaves, and M. paniculata with gold over mustard-yellow. Both these meconopsis look heavily armed, but a touch will show that they are as soft as any goose’s breast. The spines of cactus make sense, for they are generally protective devices, a sort of noli me tangere to would-be molesters. Maybe, as often happens in the animal and plant kingdoms (and with people), a bit of fakery is thought to do for the real thing. Most probably, the hairs are a cunning device to catch dew and raindrops, thus creating a humid microclimate around each plant. Practical as that might be for the plant, it is also a delight to the gardener, for when the foot-wide rosettes of lobed leaves are beaded over, they seem made of glass, the one silver and the other gold.
Both M. paniculata and M. napaulensis are monocarpic, and that is the curse they bear. To be monocarpic is not necessarily to be biennial, since, though some plants will flower the second year from seed, most will wait two years, or even three, before thrusting up towering flower stalks in early June. M. paniculata may reach 6 feet, with generally yellow, pendulous, 2-inch flowers, though pink forms may occur; M. napaulensis can be even taller, perhaps to 8 feet, with flowers of clear blue, brick red, pink, purple, and very occasionally white. Early in their flowering, both possess startling beauty, but like a few other flowering plants (such as Liatris spicata, the ‘Kansas gayfeather’) the flowers open at the top of the stalk and move downward; so the show, at its middle and end, is somewhat marred by the passing of the main characters. One need not look, either, for the beautiful rosette of leaves, since it will be all withered away, never to return again.
No Asian meconopsis has ever reappeared here from self-sown seed, presumably because the winters are too cold for their survival. So the fine grains must be shaken from gaunt stalks, seeded immediately, pricked out, and carried through their first winter in a very cool greenhouse, to be planted out in spring. As with all monocarpic plants, it is a lot of work. But in leaf and in flower, both M. paniculata and M. napaulensis are so beautiful that it is worth the trouble. Besides, it is another distinction for the garden.
Gardening as I do in a very cold section of the country, where minimum winter lows routinely reach −20° Fahrenheit, and where there are scarcely 100 frost-free days between the last cold snap in spring (May) and the first of autumn (early September), I have had to become inured to more insults than the weather. The worst come from fellow gardeners who live in milder climates and who routinely ask why I have chosen such a place to spend my gardening life, where “as the world knows, little can flourish but lichens.” It is always on the surface a well-meant question, rather like “Why do you drink so much?” or “Why have you gotten so stout?” But it hides within it a certain smugness, a tone of self-congratulation born of the conviction that they—from luck, chance, or choice—never have committed such a folly, and never would.
My answers to this question vary with the slant of my interlocutor. For those who care about such things, political, social, and ecological considerations make it easy to justify living in Vermont. Those who can see the beauty of its wooded hills, the purity of its air, the glory of its autumn and its deep, snowy winter silences are also simple to shut up. But the real gardener, the committed crank, still will drone on. “Yes, but what can you grow?”
If they are on the spot, they can look about the garden, which now comprises about seven acres, with many plants (such as stewartias, listed to zone 5, or halesias, to zone 6) that might be surprises flourishing here. The climate, for all its brutal winter cold, provides much help in accommodating plants assumed to be too tender for Vermont. Summer droughts are rare, so in July and August lawns remain emerald green. Soils, at least in my part of the state, are very nearly perfect, deep, humus-rich, and free-draining, the proverbial “sandy loam” seldom met with elsewhere. An elevation of about 1,800 feet gives the garden cool nights and bright, warm days, just the conditions that so many garden plants relish. Snow cover is deep and reliable, blanketing the garden in winter in a way that I have come to think of as curiously warm, for all its icy whiteness. And by many tricks and feints, first from necessity and now with odd pleasure, I have become adept at playing games with hardiness, which is, for gardeners located in areas like mine, another sort of outdoor winter sport.
But still, if I had to name—if I were positively required to name—one group of plants I grow that justifies where I garden, it would be meconopsis. How dreadfully sad I am for other gardeners who cannot have them.
The Rayburn and the Rose
BY MARINA WARNER
MY RAMBLING GUINÉE, one of the darkest and muskiest of all roses, has been cut and bent down on its side and bundled in strips of blue kitchen rags (the variety called J-cloths in England); it’s now lying shipwrecked athwart the mobcap hydrangea. This was my friend Henrietta’s remedy, to save the rose from being mangled when the men came to fell the almond tree in which Guinée was all entwined. The tree, which was here when I first moved into my house, died of old age; the spread and angles of its dark branches marked the end of the cul-de-sac where I live and I used to fancy it turned the street into one of those Chinese scrolls, painted with a swashbuckling ideogram for happiness or long life or good fortune.
Early in the summer, after the almond blossom has long gone, scattering the winter in a gentle sprinkle of pink, Guinée’s dark, tender and fat buds would appear, tinged black on each petal’s furled edge. When the roses opened, sable shadows welled in between their velvet, with a sheen in its crimson such as the Venetians achieve with translucent glaze upon glaze. I imagine that when this deep deep rose was successfully bred, it was named Guinée by a French nurseryman who had been steeped, as educated Frenchmen are, in Baudelairean dreams of luxe, calme et volupté, and he was following a train of associations that leads from the poet’s dreamed Vénus noire, Jeanne Duval, to the coast of West Africa, that point of departure for so many in the black diaspora. But the name Guinée—guinea—was also used as an insult for Italians during the early waves of immigration to the United States. My mother was born in Puglia in southern Italy, and her whole family left for Chicago in the first decade of the century, only to return, whipped by the American backlash of the twenties. So the passionate darkness of the rose called Guinée connects me to my mother, too.
From my bedroom, in late May, I’d begin to see Guinée’s lovely dark heads resting here and there against the lighter spears of the almond’s foliage. I’d go down and climb onto the dustbins, which stand incongruously under the almond tree, to pick a rose and bring it in: its scent was alive, and the black-crimson velvet of the petals warm when you stroked them, as I could not help doing. But this sense of the flesh in the rose is still innocent, in spite of the sumptuousness of the flower’s colour and fragrance and swirl: touching Guinée recalls the skin of a baby. Its sweet musk is quick and fresh, again like something newly sprung.
The men came yesterday to cut down the dead almond; it was early in the morning, a quiet weekday, everyone in my street already gone to work. We had a quick, deadly row. I was anxious about my tree and my garden and they were young, large louts with big mouths and heavy boots who flung down their tools on the garden, snapping a clematis at the root and trampling the dwarf geranium and the lamb’s tongues ground cover as if they’d been let loose on a demolition job on a garage. So I sent them packing and they went, leaving the sere almond still standing, and Guinée bundled up, waiting for a new host. I am considering a Judas tree. Its acid-pink blossom will banish the winter greys with a flourish, and its later, hoofprint-bunched leaves might make an odd but striking setting for the rose’s splendour.
When I was twelve, my father planted a rose garden round our family house near Cambridge, where he was a bookseller. The plan stood on the mantelpiece in the drawing room, and it was one of those family jokes that are constantly recalled with fond chuckles that a snobbish friend picked it up and, looking at the diagram of beds with the names filled in—Cécile Brunner, Madame Albert Carrière, Madame Grégoire Staechlin, Albertine, Constance Spry—exclaimed, “Good heavens, Plum (this was my father’s nickname), what a bizarre placement! What kind of a dinner party is this?” I used to walk around with him when he was proudly showing the growing roses to a visitor. He’d talk about feeding them with bonemeal and blood, of keeping them happy in the heavy fenland clay, of the necessary curbing of their high spirits and the risk of waterlogging in the region’s persistent rainfall—the buds would swell and tarnish on the stem. “Shrouded nuns,” he called them. He was reluctant to prune hard, however, and raged, too, against municipal and suburban garden maintenance men, who cut roses back to the root each year. He was filled with enthusiasm for his roses’ potential, and he worried that they might be harshly handled, undernourished, blighted; anyone who was employed to help was always dismissed almost immediately. They were his nurslings. I realised, eavesdropping as he hobbyhorsed about his roses, that everything he said about them could be said of us, his two daughters. He had a terrible temper, but he was an indulgent father and did not prune us back. Guinée was his favourite, and it carries his memory vividly for me.
In the raw lightless mornings of the long winter months of East Anglia, he’d go out in his carpet slippers and his worn tweed dressing gown, which, the original belt lost long ago, he tied with a tasselled curtain pull. He’d take the path beside the rose garden to the coal hole and we’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the tumble of the coal into the scuttle; he’d return to the kitchen, where my mother would be at the Rayburn, riddling the grate with an ingenious hooked poker in order to rekindle the embers of the night, and then raking the spent clinkers and ashes into the pan. Afterwards, she’d mop the floor and wipe the woolly brickdust such a stove exhales onto every surface and into every cranny.
Copyright © 1998 by Jamaica Kincaid; Copyright © 1998 by Hilton Als; Copyright © 1998 by Tony Avent; Copyright © 1998 by Geoffrey B. Charlesworth; Copyright © 1998 by Dan Chiasson; Copyright © 1998 by Henri Cole; Copyright © 1998 by Thomas C. Cooper; Copyright © 1998 by Thomas Fischer; Copyright © 1998 by Michael Fox; Copyright © 1998 by Ian Frazier; Copyright © 1998 by Steven A. Frowine; Copyright © 1998 by Nancy Goodwin; Copyright © 1998 by Daniel Hinkley; Copyright © 1998 by Mary Keen; Copyright © 1998 by Maxine Kumin; Copyright © 1998 by Christopher Lloyd; Copyright © 1998 by Duane Michals; Copyright © 1998 by Michael Pollan; Copyright © 1998 by David Raffeld; Copyright © 1998 by Elaine Scarry; Copyright © 1998 by Graham Stuart Thomas; Copyright © 1998 by Marina Warner; Copyright © 1998 by Wayne Winterrowd.