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A very attractive dark flowered species. I had an impostor originally but Gary Dunlop sent me the real thing. It has grown strongly in the garden
but in recent years I think the original plant has been replaced by a paler seedling. Jill Cowley says: "We know nothing of the origins of this plant, which has been growing at Kew since 1964. The best guess is that it was introduced by Frank Kingdon Ward. Of the wild collections of this species in the herbarium, the vast majority were collected by him. Unfortunately it is often true, as with Ward's collections of Roscoea australis from Mount Victoria in Burma, that the collecting data are lost when plants are distributed; growers in the past often seem to have failed to retain the information relating to their plants. Kingdon Ward collected this species many times when in the monsoon belt in the area of the Upper Irrawaddy, in the boundary areas of Tibet, Assam, Burma and China, between the years 1926 and 1933, and he was struck by the "flowers of rich tyrian purple" when collecting in the Adung Valley in July 1931 (KW.9682). However, in his many accounts of those trips in his books and articles, he never mentions these Roscoeas. We have to rely on the notes that he wrote on the labels accompanying his pressed collections. Luckily, these notes often go into great detail, so that they form a valuable tool for the researcher. Because if this, I used his name when choosing a specific epithet for this species. This species is without doubt in cultivation in many gardens that are our horticultural treasure houses. Roscoea wardii occurs in eastern Tibet; Kingdon Ward's collection came from Zayul. He also collected the species in Assam, in the Delei Valley, and at the frontier in the Di Chu valley. His specimens from Burma came from the Adung Valley. Farrer 1766 is a collection from the Burma-Yunnan borders: Yu collected specimens in Yunnan itself near the borders in the upper Kiukiang valley. The species grows in these areas in meadows and open, grassy places, along margins of dense thickets, shady and moist places, and beneath bushes in Abies or Rhododendron forest. They can also be found on south facing gravel and alpine turf slopes, or on mud slides recently uncovered by melting snow at altitudes between 2440 and 3960m. Flowering is from May to the beginning of August." |
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| 15th June 2006 | ||
