Horthistoria

Primroses

Primroses may be found in many countries but they have such a long history in the British Isles that they are part of everyday speech. We lead someone “down the primrose path”, meaning that we plan to seduce them. Benjamin Disraeli, that wily old Victorian prime minister, founded the Primrose League, an organization for young politicians, symbolizing youth and promise.

Auricula, (P.x pubescens) arrived in Britain at the end of the 16th century, possibly carried by the wave of Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France. The red primrose, P. rubra, was introduced in the mid-18th century and led to an explosion of new forms.¹ From Britain and Europe the familiar varieties travelled to America with the great migrations of the past three hundred years.

The name is a corruption of “Prima Rosa”, the first flower of spring. This is a genus with 430 species known at present, subdivided into seven (or eight) sub-genera to make them more amenable. The largest number of species are in the Sino-Himalayan region, approximately 78%. The United States has about 16% and Europe 6 %. They are not found in southern latitudes.

The small number of native species in Europe may be a little misleading.² Centuries of selection, mostly by poor workingmen as a hobby and release from backbreaking toil, had resulted in exquisite varieties of polyanthus, (P. veris x P.vulgaris) and auricula in England and on the Continent.³ The “florists” made excellent use of what they had.

Highly developed forms of Primula sinensis were grown for hundreds of years in China as was P. sieboldii in Japan. These plants were not known outside their native countries, nor did the highly civilized Chinese coastal communities have any idea of the riches in their western hinterlands. This phase lasted until the mid-nineteenth century when it became possible to explore for plants in China, Japan, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan and the other Himalayan countries. China became accessible in 1843, and Japan in 1854.

Even then it took a long time before change occurred. Northern India had been available to the British for two hundred years, but travel was extremely difficult and often dangerous.

Reaching the West

The train of events from observing a plant in the wild to reaching Western nurseries is long, complex and arduous. Many of the remarkable early explorers in the 1860s, such as the French missionaries, were primarily botanists. They made careful notes, preserved specimens and seeds for scientific observation, but were not thinking of the gardener. The idea of seeking new plants specifically for commerce arose later.

The pantheon of primula collectors may be said to consist of Joseph Hooker, Ernest H. Wilson, Frank Kingdon Ward, Reginald Farrer, George Forrest, Heinrich von Handel-Mazzetti, Frank Ludlow, and George Sherriff. Other men (and it usually was men) contributed and should be remembered with respect but these were the outstanding figures.

They all overcame horrifying obstacles, ranging from hostile and inhospitable local people, lack of food and shelter much of the time, impossible terrain, dreadful parasites, diseases of every kind and in one case, a 9.2 earthquake. Philip Short, an Australian botanist , has collected excerpts from many diaries and published an anthology “In Search of Plants” which tells much of this story.⁴

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 1817 - 1911, was the first European collector to return with a large number of new primula species, though earlier explorers, such as Nathaniel Wallich, David Don, J. F Royle and William Griffith had all been to the Himalayan endemic regions before him. Richards notes the slow incremental expansion of primula species in the British Isles before the first world war.⁵

It was a happy chance that Hooker found P. malacoides and P. obconica very early. Both of them lent themselves to rapid and successful hybridizing, and were very popular as house plants. The heyday of exploring for plants and the discovery of new primula was the hundred years between 1850 and 1950. Since then, there have been successful exploration and wonderful discoveries but not on the heroic scale of the earlier expeditions.

Joseph Hooker was the son of Sir William Hooker, the great botanist and horticulturist who put Kew Gardens back on its feet after the death of Sir Joseph Banks in 1820 had left it without a leader or protector for almost twenty years.⁶

Joseph was the second of five children and the apple of his father’s eye. He was trained as a naval surgeon. Almost immediately after he qualified he left on voyages of exploration. Hooker prepared the first flora of the Antipodes, including parts of Antarctica. He travelled in great style in India as befitting an English overlord, but the king of Nepal did not hesitate to throw him in prison for six weeks on a trumped-up charge. Hooker’s expeditions were paid for by Kew, in other words the British Government.

Ernest H. Wilson, 1872- 1930, was born in Chipping Hamden in Gloucestershire and may be one of its most famous sons.⁷ He was apprenticed at the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew and very quickly rose in the horticultural world.

The prospect of just doing gardening was not really attractive. He wanted a better life. The English class system was still very repressive however and he had few options. To improve his chances Wilson took extra classes in English and technical subjects, hoping to become a botany teacher.

His zeal and initiative were noted by Sir William Thistleton-Dyer, Joseph Hooker’s son-in- law and director of Kew in his turn. When Sir Harry Veitch, owner of the great Victorian nursery, was looking for an enterprising young man to go to China and find Davidia involucrata, Thistleton-Dyer recommended Wilson.

Veitch first sent him to the Arnold Arboretum near Boston, to be briefed on plant hunting in Asia by Charles Sprague Sargent. Wilson and Sargent became firm friends. In the end, Sargent lured him away from Veitch to become first his associate and after Sargent’s death, Keeper of the Arnold Arboretum.

Wilson was an indefatigable plant collector, starting in China in 1899 and visiting all the major Asian countries more than once. His books reflect his knowledge and skill. Wilson survived all the difficulties of the dangerous foreign lands but died in a car accident in upstate New York.

Frank Kingdon Ward, 1886 - 1958, overlapped Wilson to some extent but came from the other end of the social spectrum.⁸ His father was professor of Botany at Cambridge University and he was a graduate of that university himself. From childhood, he had wanted to be an explorer and plant collector.

Although he came from the upper class, the family was poor and he took the first job he could find, to earn a living and be in Asia. Teaching little boys in Shanghai was not appealing but it very quickly led to him being recruited by A. K. Bulley, the Liverpool cotton millionaire who was supporting plant exploration for the nursery he started as an avocation.

Reginald Farrer, 1880 - 1920, was only forty when he died of pneumonia in China.⁹ He too came from the upper class. His father was a rich Yorkshire dalesman and his mother a cousin of the Sitwells, great Yorkshire landowners and literary geniuses. Farrer suffered acutely from having a cleft palate. It affected his social behavior, making him superficially scornful and brittle but actually deeply vulnerable to slights and cruel teasing.

Going to China, adopting native dress and making his name in plant collecting and the rock garden movement, were all balm to a wounded spirit. Farrer’s books were widely read in spite of the “purple prose” and often misleading statements about plants.”The English Rock Garden” may be the best known, but “On The Eaves Of The World” has also been very popular.

George Forrest, 1873 - 1932, epitomised the hardworking, strongly motivated poor Scottish youth who was determined to make something of himself and escape the grinding poverty of his upbringing.¹⁰ Many such men are to be

found in the annals of plant exploration, out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Some diehards say that the British Empire ought really to be called the “Scottish Empire”.

Forrest held a very low level position at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, but used every moment to improve himself. He too caught the eye of his superiors. When Bulley came looking for a man to travel in the East and collect new plants, Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour, the director of the garden, recommended Forrest. It was an excellent choice. Forrest selected the south western section of China close to the Tibetan border as his territory. He trained the local men, and organized them into teams which fanned out over a very wide area. They covered far more ground than he could as a single individual. A further advantage was that their presence did not excite the hostility that foreigners evoked.

Forrest had an “industrial” approach long before this was common.He sent back prodigious quantities of whatever he found. Rhododendron was his great passion but his contribution to primula was staggering too.

When Ward first appeared in the area he chased him off very roughly. No one could collect in his patch. He had nothing but contempt for Ward, an ignorant, soft-handed college boy in his eyes. It turned out Forrest was hopelessly incorrect about Ward’s potential but he felt very threatened.

Heinrich von Handel-Mazzetti, 1882- 1940, was born in Vienna, to an Austrian father and Italian mother.¹¹ His interests were primarily botanical. He did not introduce plants into cultivation the way so many of the other did, but he was an immense authority on Asian primula. At the Fourth Primula Conference in 1928, Handel-Mazzetti presented a paper on the natural habitats of Chinese primula. He also offered useful scientific insight into the reason so many new species were found in the south western region of China and neighboring Tibet. The north-south disposition of the mountain chains, the great river valleys between them and the effects of the Ice Ages were all part of his thesis.

Some of his work resulted from his enforced stay in China at the end of the first world war. He was not allowed to travel or leave the country.

The travels of Frank Ludlow, 1886 - 1972, and George Sherriff, 1898 - 1967, took place between 1933 and 1949, the year the Communists seized power in China.¹² Foreigners were no longer welcome to roam around. The two men made seven trips in all and sent back about 130 varieties of primula.

Ludlow was a college teacher in British India. He started out as a passionate amateur ornithologist but ended up as a plant taxonomist once he retired back to England. His collections often contained the skins of rare birds as well as plants.

George Sherriff was a professional soldier, skilled at logistics. He too was an enthusiastic naturalist. Their journeys were the exception to the rule. Sherriff made sure they had adequate supplies, even sending men on ahead to plant vegetable seeds, so they would have fresh produce on the way back. There were many things outside his control, such as the leeches which made them very miserable.

Until the mid-20th century, protecting the precious cargo of plants on the long and hazardous journey back to Europe was fairly hit or miss, even with the Wardian case. Sherriff came up with the idea of stowing his material next to the refrigerators on the great ocean liners. His ultimate stroke was dispatching them by air. No one had ever done this before.

It is rather sad that in spite of the great care expended on the safe passage, very many of the new species did not thrive in Britain or Europe. Time and again, Harold Fletcher, the author of A Quest of Flowers, based on Ludlow and Sherriff’s diaries, notes that a species would flower briefly but not set seed. Sherriff himself laid out a wonderful garden when he retired to Ascreavie in Scotland, but even he could not coax the primula into surviving. The best Asian primula came from high altitude with eternal rain. The Highlands of Scotland are pretty damp but not on the Himalayan scale.

This article published in American Primrose Society Journal Fall 2005

References

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