[pbs] Re: TOTW: Sources
Antennaria at aol.com
Antennaria at aol.com
Tue Mar 11 22:41:25 EST 2003
I'm going to kill two birds here with one stone by discussing Allium, last
week's TOTW, and Sources, this week's TOTW.
Back in the 70s there was a well known (infamous) nursery in Massauchusetts
known as Blackthorne Gardens. For a small local area nursery, they produced
an impressive glossy color catalog with an overdose of nursery hype and big
$$ items. It caught my eye when a whole page featured a new and fantastic
Allium hybrid, the page gushing with poetic musings of this rare Chinese
allium species which he (Mr. Blackthorne) had reputably hybridized...
resulting in an ethereal blue-flowered allium with fabulous foliage and
sky-blue flowers... the plant in question: Allium tanguticum 'Blue Skies'.
I received plants from Blackthorne Gardens, and subsequently also received
plants second-hand from other sources in the interest of verifying the claim.
It turns out that the plant in question is an insipid and inferior form of
Allium senescens ssp. montanum (now A. lusitanicum) with overly tall stems
and dull, washed out white-pinkish-lilac flowers (yawn). The true A.
tanguticum is not in cultivation... it's a bulbous species (not rhizomatous
as with the imposter) with red-purple flowers, not blue. In the years that
followed, I battled against this hoax and complete misnomer, but the plant
shows up everywhere and still to this day this inferior pale pinkish plant is
described as "blue" (it's an emperor's clothes thing).
The hoax was primarily perpetuated by a well-known bulb "specialty grower" in
Wisconsin (one of the names begins with the letter "z" and ends with
"immerman"), whether knowingly or not, they continued to sell the plant under
this name for many years after sending letters repeatedly informing them of
the mistake. I also corresponded with the actually grower of the plant, a
wholesaler in Oregon that grew this plant by the thousands and sold most of
his plants to that nursery. Via our correspondance, the grower became quite
convinced about the error, then tried to get the bulb nursery to accept the
correction, but they refused and continued to sell under the imposter name in
spite of the corrected name it was supplied under. The grower, before he was
aware of the error, had also named a seedling from the so-called 'Blue Skies"
and named it A. tanguticum "Summer Skies", which became as entrenched as the
original imposter, but in this case it was done naively. That cultivar wasn't
much better than the miserable 'Blue Skies', and it still wasn't anything
close to A. tanguticum.
The moral is, sometimes these errors become so entrenched, that it is near
impossible to correct the bogus mistake or egregious indiscretion. In this
case, I'm convinced that the original offering was a hoax, and the subsequent
"turning a blind eye" by the Wisconsin nursery was spurred on by $$$. By the
way, the original Blackthorne Nursery was banned from advertiseing in the
ARGS bulletins (American Rock Garden Society) due to the number of complaints
against the nursery.
Mark McDonough Pepperell, Massachusetts, United States
antennaria at aol.com "New England" USDA Zone 5
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