Soldanella montana

Soldanella montana

	Widespread in the mountains of Continental Europe. I grow a few species together in the alpine house and this is usually the last to have its flowers eaten off by slugs. It always seems quite coarse to me, although it is a grossly unfair thing to say about such a tiny plant. I bought it from Triffids Nursery, their label says: "Fringed purple flowers April-May. Shade loving alpine. Needs well dained soil in light shade 6in." Dan Hinkley said in the Heronswood catalogue (2000): "An undemanding species that, though recommended as an ideal bog plant, thrives in our relatively dry woodland, where in early spring nodding and fringed violet flowers are produced on 8in stems above mounds of rounded, evergreen foliage. Will ultimately spread by stolons to produce sizable colonies."
6th April 2017

Reginald Farrer said:

"S. montana is certainly the grandest species of all, and in cultivation certainly the one most rarely seen. It does not affect great elevations, preferring moist and rather opener places among the brushwood and coppice of the Alps from end to end (especially, as some say, on the limestone), widely varying, but always to be easily recognised by its especial amplitude,and singleness of tuft or clump. It is large and loose in growth, with perfectly round leathery dark leaves, usually with a certain amount of vague scalloping at their edge ; from the clump arise stems of 6 or 9 inches, carrying some half a dozen immense lavender-lilac blossoms of particular shallowness, widely open and wildly fringy, with recurving open edges, borne here and there at spacious intervals up the stalk. It is a most stately species, and far too rarely seen in cultiva tion, where, however, it is yet easier and more lavish than the rest."


8th April 2018	8th April 2018	19th April 2018

References:

Farrer, Reginald - 'The English Rock Garden', 1919