Oddities


Here I come on the hunt for information again, about a couple more oddities and obscurities. All I've found via the Web is confirmation that the plants in fact exist, the names are - or have been - real names.
 
What horticulturally useful information I *do* have about them comes from a splendid old book, Winter Blossoms from the Outdoor Garden, written and illustrated by A.W. Darnell and published (Reeve & Co, London) in 1926. (Large chunks of the book's text are in fact available on the Web, from the non-profit-making library-and-librarian-helping organisation, OCLC, based in Dublin, Ohio.)
 
The plants are:
 
1. Lycioplesium pubiflorum (syn Latua venenata), a member of the Solanaceae. It comes from Chile, as so many of the plants I find interesting do - to be precise, from the area running from Valdivia down to Chiloe Island. When Darnell wrote it was cultivated outdoors in the South West of the UK and in sheltered London gardens and had been since its introduction in the 1860s. No sign of it today, so far as I'm aware (at which point Mark Brent will probably pipe up and tell me there are giant specimens in Cornwall!). Darnell describes this shrub as having many-flowered spikes of pendulous rich red-purple flowers, like giant versions of the flowers of heather (individual flowers up to an inch and a half long). He doesn't give any indication of the overall size of the plant but since he describes it as semi-scandent I assume it must be several feet high and wide.
 
2. Befaria coarctata (syn Bejaria coarctata) (Darnell in fact has coartata, not coarctata, but I think that's just a misprint; at least, I can't find any trace of it as a name). This is a dwarf shrub from the Peruvian Andes, a rhododendron relative, with pale rose coloured flowers streaked, as Darnell puts it (a solemn buttoned-up old soul, our A.W., not inclined to slanginess) 'with a deeper tint of the same hue.' It flowers profusely ('covers itself with blossoms,' says AWD) when only a foot high, only grows to a couple of feet or so anyway (useful attribute for someone with a small garden, like mine), and was when AWD wrote grown successfully outdoors in the south and west of the UK. No longer...
 
I do realise that these S. Americans which are of particular interest to me aren't in any real sense 'Mediterranean' but so far as I know there isn't any alternative group which is specifically devoted to plants suitable for 'mild temperature, high rainfall' gardens, so... I turn to you kind (and broad-minded and broad-interested and knowledgeable) folks, in the hope that somebody out there may have tried one or the other of my oddities and may have further information about them - even, a source for seed??!
 
TIA from the for-once-quite-Mediterranean Solway Firth in Cumbria UK, with temps. nudging up towards 30C and an actual heat haze over the Galloway hills on the far side of the Firth....


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