Re: Vallea-dictory

There's at least one plant at Strybing Arboretum here
in San Francisco. 'Quietly beautiful' is a perfect
description. I don't believe it blooms for a very long
time, but I don't examine it every time I visit there.
I've not seen it in private gardens in the SF Bay
Area, but then I haven't been on a garden tour in at
least a year. Perhaps it's grown more often in
Southern California.
-Jason Dewees


--- Einionygarddwr@aol.com wrote:
> One plant which seems to have only the most tenuous
> toehold in cultivation in 
> Britain is the Andean shrub, Vallea stipularis. I
> first came across it in the 
> catalogue of a now-defunct nursery in Devon, S.W.
> England, where its variety 
> pyrifolia is described as 'a semi-evergreen large
> shrub, pink flowers in 
> summer. Quietly beautiful'. I've since come across a
> reference to it in Jane 
> Taylor's book 'The Milder Garden', where she says
> that it is rather sensitive 
> to frosts, and describes the flowers as having
> cup-shaped pink petals held in 
> paler, rose-red veined sepals. It sounds
> indispensible, but a look in The 
> Plant Finder shows that, whether in its typical or
> varietal form, only 3 
> nurseries in the UK list it & all 3 are, no surprise
> to residents of the UK, 
> in Devon & Cornwall. I've never set eyes on this
> plant, so what I would like 
> to know is: 1) is it really as beautiful as the
> descriptions suggest? and 2) 
> is it more commonly cultivated in places such as
> California or Australasia, 
> where it should, in theory at any rate, be a great
> success?
> 
> Einion Hughes,
> Rhyl,
> increasingly a home to Antipodean plants of all
> descriptions!
> 


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