While it’s tempting to blame our dry gravelly soil for the failure of the half dozen hybrid primroses I used to purchase each year, lured by their bright colours at garden centre, grocery stores and lumber yards, the truth is that when we gardened in more civil conditions these plants only rarely survived to bloom again. Too bad, as they certainly lend an upbeat rush of rainbow colours to the spring garden and the truth is that if these were the only primroses available I’d be quite happy to purchase them each autumn and think of them as annuals, discarding them the following spring.

In the last few years, however, I’ve discovered some far hardier sorts that seem quite happy to keep us company, even in our dry-ish garden and, incredibly, even in the dry-ish shade of deciduous trees. There are dozens of species of primroses and while gardening colleagues are particularly taken with candelabra primroses I’ve given up on these moisture lovers for the moment and put my money on some other families which have proved more forgiving. Some are a little, shall we say, flouncier than I’d prefer, but there you have it. They happily grow here. They’re make bright dashes of colour in some of the coldest, greyest months and some are even scented. I’m grateful enough to forgive even glossy, nearly ultra-violet shades of pink.

The primula family is comprised of more than 400 species and countless cultivars, some of which have been grown in gardens for 5 centuries. Those useful for gardens are commonly divided into three groups: Candelabra primroses which bear their flowers in tiers on upstanding stems and always prefer moist but free draining soil; Polyanthus, with several flowers on thick stems blooming early in the spring, best known in the hybrid forms sold each spring; and Auriculas, which again can be sub-divided into three groups, alpine, border and show. Although there is a huge difference between the prices of border and show Auriculas, show Auriculas moved into the garden become border Auriculas - while border Auriculas never quite make it to the show tables. For gardeners looking for an obsession the primula family promises to keep one busy for a lifetime.

It’s always a good idea to begin with species that grow in climates much like our own where one knows they have managed to compete against other sorts of weeds for water, nutrients and light. This is certainly the case with Primula eliator, the English Oxslip, and P. veris, the Cowslip. Both come from the English countryside, a climate rather like our own. A British correspondent who loves to tell me stories about plants (thus getting away from his work at Oxford) writes that the name Cowslip is derived from the Old English cuslyppe, meaning cowpat, because cowslips grew in dunged fields.

I’m not sure why I was so hesitant to try them. For ten years people told me they were difficult and impossible to propagate and I believed them. Don’t you. Our clump, which began with a single plant and has now expanded (with a little assistance) grows in dry shade under a Big Leaf maple, one of the most challenging sites in our garden. Each spring it throws up hardy 10" stems topped with nodded yellow flowers which are richly scented if one bends down to smell them. The colour of the flowers isn’t lemon or gold or bright yellow, it’s simply "primrose." Deep purple-blue sweet violets, Viola odorata, are superb companions.

"Well," said an English garden visitor who thought it wasn’t possible, after my clump had not merely survived but prospered for two years, "you may have been able to grow it successfully but don’t try to move it or divide it." Why not just wave a red flag. Division is a snap - and a joy. Immediately after they have stopped flowering or in Autumn just after the rains have begun I dig up half the clumps and break them into divisions of one rosette each. Some have almost no roots at all, which was a little frightening the first time I did it. I amend the soil with some compost and organic fertiliser and replant the expanding colony. Using such a technique with any perennial, by the way, gives you a nice mix of little and big plants that looks far more natural than several plants of the same size or one big plant. Last but not least, here’s the really exciting thing about dividing cowslips - the bruised roots are sweetly scented of primrose, even more than the flowers. I collect the bigger roots, wash them well in the sink, let them dry and then chop them up to add to pot pourri.

"Well, it’s good thing they lived through the division," said the garden visitor when they returned the next year, "because they’re impossible to grow from seed." Well . . . they’re not, as it turns out. I collected fresh seed when it ripened in June and sowed it in trays of compost. I kept these in the shade and made sure they were consistently moist. By July I had twenty little seedlings which I then pricked out and potted up. Unfortunately a deer knocked them over but that’s another story. Occasionally one finds selected forms of P. veris which have orange or red tinged flowers (Primula veris ‘Crimson N’ Gold’, sold by Rainforest Nurseries) or relatively open faced flowers (P. veris ssp. columnae).

Cowslips and Oxlips are part of that small family of old fashioned plants with long romantic, literary and mythological histories. They’re perfect cottage garden plants: friendly, bright and easy to care for. They also have a history of herbal usage as a general panacea as well as eaten candied as sweets or cake decorations and the leaves as greens, fresh or boiled. Cowslip tea is an old herbal remedy made by pouring boiling water over fresh or dried flowers, steeping, straining and drinking a few times a day for headaches, stomache ache, restlessness, insomnia, constipation, etc. Compresses of cowslip leaves have also been used to ease migraine. P. vulgaris is another hedgerow plant with a long history of human association and there are countless forms of this to grow in the garden. Gertrude Jekyll writes of growing them from seed and finding "they vary in detail so much, in form, colour, habit, arrangement, and size of eye and shape of edge, that one year thinking it might be useful to classify them I tried to do so, but gave it up after writing out the characters of sixty classes. Their possible variations seem endless. Every year among the seedlings there appear a number of charming flowers with some new development of size, or colour of flower, or beauty of foliage, and yet all within the narrow bounds of - white and yellow Primroses." In East Vancouver I discovered a whole garden of plants which might well be very like those Jekyll started with in her breeding experiments - healthy plants with lots of foliage and pale yellow, scented, open-faced flowers held gracefully above 18" stems. The gardener had got the original seed from an English relation and had been dividing them each year until finally she was nearly overwhelmed and only too happy to let me have a clump. These bloom from mid-April until nearly June every year.

A group I’m excited about are the "new" heirloom hardy primroses, double flowered selections of P. vulgaris, that have become available over the last couple of years, their re-introduction inspired by gardeners looking for authentic looking cottage garden plants. Certainly these qualify. My favourite, most days, is ‘Quaker’s Bonnet,’ a good pink double with healthy green foliage. Another favourite is ‘Dawn Ansell,’ which is a white double, each little flower sporting a ring of miniature leaves, making it one of the "Jack-in-the-green" primroses that garden fairies are said to prefer. Do look also for the old fashioned "hose-in-hose" primroses in which the true flower grows out of a row of petals held just behind, making it look elegantly double.

Another favourite double has one of the most awful names in my garden, ‘Sunshine Suzy.’ This is a glowing apricot and gold double that covers itself with flowers from about six weeks in early spring. Other warm colours include ‘Ken Dearman’, which has tangerine-orange petals and ‘Red Velvet’, with ruby red double flowers and leaves edged with carmine. As the foliage of primroses isn’t their greatest suit this plant is a welcome addition.

Interestingly, in the 1930's Major Knocke of Cowichan Valley discovered a deep maroon eyeless primrose with red tinged foliage, refining these into the "Cowichan Primrose" seed strain, available through Thompson and Morgan Seeds, and I like to think that my primrose may be a descendant of those Cowichan seedlings. More recently, Dr. Kerridge of Saltspring Island has made his gold laced primula seed strain world famous. These are available by mail-order through The Plant Farm and Rainforest Gardens and will soon become one of the delights of your spring garden, with their Victorian-looking ruddy petals edged in pale gold. All in all, it would seem that this is primrose country.

Perhaps the most well known hardy primrose is P. juliana, a pass-along plant often known simply as Wanda primroses (and sometimes sold as P. wanda). This is one of the first plants I was given for our garden. Since then it has changed its name (darn those taxonomists), according to the Corresponding Secretary of the American Primrose Society, to P. pruhoniciana. Most often available in magenta purple there are other selections, rarely available it seems, in blue, red, white, yellow and plum. Ms. Lunn recommends several and I’ve put one of these on my "plants wanted" list as it sounds great: ‘Jay-Jay’, with red purple flowers ringed with Jack-in-the-green leaves. One often finds them in old gardens and while they are perhaps not the choicest plants to have, they are very easy. Here on Gabriola Island I was glad to finally be given a division of the lavender P. v. wanda that seems to be something of a local heirloom. In an old garden made just after the Second World War I found clumps of this three feet across, scrubby trees having grown up all around them, still blooming sporadically. The little divisions I took home were glad to be placed in some amended soil and took off immediately, growing nearly a foot across by autumn

"Gold-laced" primroses are also old fashioned favourites that can add an air of authenticity and delight to a border inspired by the cottage garden theme. I’ve only just managed to get hold of some of these so can’t discuss their hardiness but they are very pretty, holding a dozen open faced flowers with throats in shades of rust to ox-blood, each bloom edged in a neat picotee of gold. So many favourite Victorian flowers have these complex colour patterns.

If it’s drama you want in the primrose family you must get busy building a stage and collecting show Auriculas. Auriculas don’t look much like the primroses we’re more familiar with until they flower. They make tight rosettes of fleshy, slightly glaucous leaves, sometimes powdered in gold (this is called "farina" and is selected for in leaf, stem and flower bud by Auricula specialists). Flowers range from white to nearly black with gold-laced flowers being particularly prized. "The Show Auricula," writes Vita Sackville-West, "... must be grown indoors or under glass, not because it fails in hardiness but because the powder "farina" gets washed off in the rain and all its essentially cleanly character is lost. It cannot afford to get itself into a mess. Neatest and most exquisitely demarcated of flowers, it must keep itself as trim as the fireside cat. Given the opportunity, it will produce in April and May flower-heads which combine at one and the same time a demure simplicity and an appearance of extreme sophistication. Grey; green; white edged with green; scarlet edged with green; yellow edged with grey; the variations are manifold. The old growers used to put their pots on ranged shelves, sometimes fitted into a small home-made theatre with scenery painted behind it as a backdrop." I can’t imagine who thought of these theatres first but they must have looked interesting, to say the least. Something of a forerunner to pink flamingos I suppose. The painted backdrops often featured volcanoes or romantically wild lightning storms or alpine peaks, against which the little perfect plants stood at attention in rows of identical clay pots. Still, it would be fun to make.

Show Auriculas are expensive, collectable plants and I have only one in my little collection, ‘Matthew Yates’, which has double near-black flowers tinged with wine. I grow it, very nicely I think, in an alpine trough with an underplanting of tiny-leaved Bressingham thyme and a miniature alpine Dianthus (see the Dec. Issue of TCG to learn how to make your own trough). Auriculas are also fine in our drought tolerant garden, which is watered only once a month if there has been little or no rain at all. Here I grow them among large stones to keep the roots cool and moist. They not only grow but prosper and have been divided each autumn so that the two original plants have now made a little bed of nine fair sized clumps, each one sporting 1 - 3 panicles of green-edged-with-black or plum-edged-with-green flowers. Try to find them in bloom at the nursery as some are far more exotic and interesting than others. Vita suggested that as the plants were as expensive in her day as they are now one should purchase a packet of really choice seeds as an easy, cheaper alternative. I intend to try this next spring as I think Auriculas are a great choice for a water-wise garden.

Ann Lunn also suggests trying P. sieboldii, a native of wet meadows in the Orient, which is supposed to be adaptable and hardy. This comes in a variety of pink to magenta shades as well as white. Even in moist soil the plants will go dormant during the summer heat, so plant them with something that will hide the bare spots. And don’t assume when you can no longer see your primroses of any kind that they’ve been murdered; more often than not they pop right back out of the ground as soon as the rains come. Dormancy is a natural reaction to drought for many plants.

Before moving along it would be remiss to not mention alpine Primroses, although I’ve just begun experimenting with these. Thus far P. auricula alpina, the alpine forbearer of the modern Auricula, is making a tight little clump of mealy leaves among my rockwork, while P. frondosa has become a tiny passion growing among silver grasses. The undersides of its leaves are silver with meal. It has tiny violet flowers. There are many alpine primulas to experiment with and I look forward to growing more of them as time passes.

Perhaps the most famous plantings of primroses, aside from those wildlings cavorting on the verges of English lanes, were in Munstead, Gertrude Jekyll’s garden, and at Sissinghurst in the Nuttery Walk. Jekyll planted hers by the thousands in a copse of stooled oaks and hazels, dividing them each May when they were just at the end of their season but with enough petals left to show what their colours were. "Every year," she writes in Wood and Garden, "before replanting, the Primrose ground is dug over and well manured. All day for two days I sit on a low stool dividing the plants; a certain degree of facility and expertness has come of long practise. ...the lusciously fragrant heap of refuse leaf and flower-stem and old stocky root rises in front of me, changing its shape from a heap to a ridge, as when it comes to a certain height and bulk I back and back away from it. A boy feeds me with armfuls of newly-dug-up plants, two men are digging-in the cooling cow-dung at the farther end, and another carries away the divided plants tray by tray, and carefully replants them." Old photographs, unfortunately in black and white, show incredible beds of flowers bisected by narrow paths. The Sissinghurst Nuttery Walk was, some believe, based on Jekyll’s garden and in its prime was glorious. As at Munstead the effect Vita Sackville-West sought was to make a closely knit carpet of colours. Unfortunately primroses are subject to a number of fungal diseases when planted in the same site over a number of years. This condition, called "primrose disease", has made necessary the replanting of the Sissinghurst Nuttery with other species (and, from photographs, it looks very, very nice).

Unlike Gertrude Jekyll I have no little stool and only the three garden boys to help out when it is time to divide the primroses. Just kidding. Or fantasizing. As in most of my garden endeavors there’s me and my coterie of animals - dogs, cats, ducks, chickens and the occasional squirrel or blue jay. I’ve found that I can divide most primroses, if I want more, both spring and autumn but experts recommend division immediately after flowering (if you have a late variety, however, don’t heed this advice as the little divisions hate our dry summers). Given misty weather, even the tiniest divisions will soon begin to grow away. I counted out how many plants I could divide a one year old clump into last autumn and the average was 11 divisions from each plant. Some, depending on the variety and the conditions they’ve been grown in, are already in bud in autumn and these I don’t split up. Replanting them in other parts of the border where a little spring colour is needed, however, seems to do them no harm at all and they bloom throughout mild spells all winter and then take off again in spring.

Colours are hard to keep track of and splitting them up and replanting them in May when they are only just finishing their blossoming is a great idea as I’ve ended up with some glaring combinations. The only colour in the range of doubles that I really do loathe is ‘Lilian Harvey ’, a violent hot pink that looks like a tiny crinoline on a plant that is much too humble to keep up to the effect. I can’t quite bring myself to toss it out as it’s such a good sport but I don’t divide it up as much as the others and I donate a disproportionate amount of its divisions to plant sales. This spring I used it to test an idea: what if you had a colour you hated, as I do, and wanted to find some spot in the garden where it wouldn’t be quite so hateful? Instead of merely complaining I dug up a blooming clump and walked it around the garden until I found other plants that matched it. In the end this gave me two rather nice little plantings, one under a beautiful crabapple, ’Rudolph,’ which has the same shocking pink flowers, but nicely toned down by ruddy-tinged leaves, and another under one of the most select of collector’s plants, now widely available, Loropetalum chinense ‘Fire Dancer’, which also has shocking pink flowers against plum coloured mature leaves and bright pink new leaves. It’s an interesting experiment to try if you have a plant you don’t much like but want to give it one last chance. I’ve since expanded these plant marriages into menage a trois with the addition of lipstick-pink tulips which should bloom at the same time.

Cultivation is quite simple. They like soil that is as moisture retentive as you can manage, so appreciate compost and peat moss worked into the soil. I’ve also been using Polymer crystals with great success on those species that enjoy damper conditions. These little granules look like tapioca when dry, and in fact they are made of linked starch molecules. Mix them with water and they swell up hugely into little sacks of moisture which can be mixed into the soil. When rain falls they suck it up until delving roots come begging. I’ve come to think they are one of the most economical of soil additives for the garden. If you insist on growing the candelabra types you might want to experiment, as I’ve been doing for the last year very successfully, with this idea: dig a deep hole, line it with plastic, poke some holes in it if it isn’t rather shredded already, re-fill with a good moisture retentive mixture which includes Polymer crystals. In a dry garden one can plant moisture loving things in such a bed and hope for the best.

While I’ve used plantings of hardy primroses throughout the whole garden my tendency recently has been to begin moving many of them together to make a primrose path in dappled, dry shad at the edge of our woodland. They grow on either side of the path, interplanted with spring flowering bulbs, Pulmonaria in several varieties, Hosta, Bleeding Heart and the delicate tracery of Sweet Woodruff. Still, we keep some in the proper borders and the drought tolerant garden, those in full sun beginning to bloom a month or so earlier than the others, which continue after they have finished.

With thanks to Ann Lunn for her assistance.

For more information about the Primula family, contact The American Primrose Society, c/o Ann Lunn, 6620 NW 271st Ave., Hillsboro, OR 97124. There is also a local study group which meets bi-monthly in Vancouver. For more information contact the B.C. Primrose Group, c/o John Kerridge, 1102, 4660 W. 10th Ave., Vancouver, B.C., V6R 2J6.

Two great sites to visit on the web are those of The American Primrose Society, at http://www.eskimo.com/~mcalpin/aps.html and Rainforest Gardens, at http://www.dsoe.com/rainforest/gardens.html