Lucky find for garden historian
30 October 2009
A gladiolus which was once a favourite of Gertrude Jekyll's but had been thought lost to cultivation may have been growing unremarked in a private garden on the Isle of Man for decades.
Garden historian and botanist, Professor Michael Tooley was lecturing in the Isle of Man when he used the example of Gladiolus x brenchleyensis, with its large scarlet flowers, as a once-popular plant that had now disappeared. In his audience was Edward Huyton, who recognised it as a clump of unidentified gladioli given to him 20 years previously by a fellow gardener and growing in his back garden ever since.
“I knew it was a very old variety, but if I hadn't seen it in the photos I still wouldn't know its name,” said Mr Huyton. “It's not as big and showy as the modern gladioli so it's probably been passed over by many people – but it's a tough old bird and goes through winter very easily.”
He has since given corms and bulbils from his garden clumps to be bulked up, and the gladiolus has now been distributed around the country. Some have returned to Munstead Wood, where Gertrude Jekyll used it in extensive drifts in her planting schemes, and others have gone to Knightshayes in Devon as part of the National Trust's Plant Conservation Programme.
The plant will not return to wider circulation, though, until it is definitively proven that Mr Huyton's plants are indeed the lost cultivar. No herbarium specimens have yet been traced, and the only way of identifying it has been through photographs and sketches. Anthony Hamilton and John Pilbeam of the British Gladiolus Society have now stepped in and are attempting to recreate what's believed to be the original cross, between G. dalenii and G. oppositiflorus subsp. salmoneus – a process which will take up to three years to produce results.