A hotdog at a Cub Scout cookout has greater life expectancy than alpine gentians in a sea-level garden.
A plant conditioned to the clear air and blazing sun of high altitudes is bound to suffer in a humid, sultry atmosphere. And its roots, designed to anchor in the austere crevices of rocky slopes, are quickly destroyed by standing water and the lack of oxygen in heavy lowland soil.
Gardeners Aren’t Easily Daunted
The more impossible the plant, the former the resolve to master it, even if adjusting the climate involves a major upheaval in the garden.
The problem with gentians is to keep these sun-lovers cool without overhead shade and to give them soil that is always moist but never stagnant.
An eastern exposure is considered ideal for these gentians, but as the only open stretch of our east wall had been limed for tree peonies, the north wall had to serve instead.
Bed Prepared For Camellias
The bed was prepared for camellias, the existing yellow clay removed to a depth of 3′ feet, and the hole refilled with roughage from the compost heap and an equal or greater amount of coarse sand.
A permanent mulch of Christmas tree branches maintains acidity. These and the shrubs are sluiced with a hose every time I go around the side of the house.
The constant evaporation keeps the temperature down. Except in the late afternoon, the direct sun is cut off by the house, yet the bed is fully open to the sky.
Outwitting Gentian
Obviously, this is a setup that no right-minded gentian could possibly take exception to. With some complacency, I noted the healthy green foliage even in the sweltering days of August.
As autumn advanced and buds formed and swelled on the upturned stems, my confidence grew with them. Finally, it seemed certain that I had found a way to outwit a gentian.
By early November, the buds had reached flowering size. Each day they seemed on the point of opening, the edges relaxed enough so that when I blew on them sharply, I caught a flash of their incomparable color.
Yet half an hour later, they’d be pinched together again as tightly as a clam shell.
Needs A Touch Of Sun
I’d overlooked one vital fact in my preoccupation with soil and temperature, but the gentian hadn’t. Without the assurance of a touch of sun, it refused to expose its pollen to the hazards of the weather.
In midsummer, the sun’s long area had swept around the house and touched the north wall, but its autumn circuit stopped short of the corner and never reached the gentian bed.
If I wanted to see the flowers, there was no choice but to cut the stems and put them in a dish of water in a south window, where they opened as soon as their reasonable demands were met.
Habit Of The Plant
The photograph was made from these cut specimens and therefore didn’t accurately represent the habit of the plant, which is decumbent or down-bending.
The stems describe a horizontal S-curve, arching outward from the base until they touch the earth and then turning upright at the flowering tip.
The picture shows the brushed-on taming finish of the flower, as softly luminous as hand-rubbed silver, but of course, and it doesn’t even suggest the beauty of its coloring.
The flowers are uniform flax-blue; the throat is white with stippled lines of deep violet; the outside of the corolla has broad stripes of purple-brown.
Proper Name
Without a doubt, my determination to see the open flower was based on a dislike of being outsmarted by a plant. Beyond that, I wanted to know its proper name.
Years ago, it came to me from a reliable nursery under the frank alias of Gentiana sikokiana.
“This name may be incorrect,” said the catalog, “but nevertheless, it is a marvelous plant.” I agree on both points, but I wanted to know more about the plant than what it quite certainly wasn’t.
I sent a pressed stem to the New York Botanical Garden, where it turned out they had the same plant under the same wrong label.
Now having a double interest, the horticulturist forwarded the specimen to the ultimate authority on gentians, David Wilkie of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, who identified it as a Japanese plant introduced about 1936 as Kirishima-Rindo and later given the name G. scabra saxatilis.
That settled its name, but not the problem of how to induce it to open its flowers outdoors. I had an idea, though.
When I separated the plant in March, I put some of the divisions in deep, roomy pots and sunk them in the water-cooled bed at the north wall, where they grew well during the summer.
By the time they would be ready to flower in November, I surmised, the air would be cold enough so they could be moved to a sunnier spot without the danger of overheating.
While the plan sounded feasible, I decided not to count my gentians before they bloomed. I’ve learned not to underestimate such wily opponents.
Happily, the experiment did work. The potted gentian, with thirteen buds on ten flowering stems, was moved to a sunny border late in October.
Nine of the flowers opened, and to my delight, were not the light flax-blue of the shade-grown flowers but a deeper, richer tone approaching the intensity of gentian-blue.
Alpine Gentians
My nine alpine gentians would scarcely be noticed in a cool mountain garden but on Long Island’s parched sandbar, where I was living at the time of the gentian experiment
46, they were cause for gratification.
The buds that failed to open may have been too small to develop before frost, or they may have been retarded by dryness.
I should have anticipated that the extremely porous potting soil, necessary for good drainage in the moist north wall, would dry out rapidly in full sun. But, instead, I had to water once or even twice a day.
Since it is the nature of a gardener never to be satisfied, I wanted to figure out a way to get a more concentrated effect. But, unfortunately, the flowers at the edges of a 15-inch circle leave too much of nothing in the middle.
By planting sprigs in three pots sunk close together clover-leaf style, the trailing stems of one covered its neighbor’s bald spots with a fringe of flowers.
44659 by M. M. Graff