Primroses I won't have in the garden
March 13, 2011
Strolling through the centre of town back in Northamptonshire today, I couldn’t help noticing the most horrible primroses offered for sale at the florist (above, click to enlarge). They were gross travesties of our delightful native wild primroses - in more or less the same shade, but in this hybrid the flowers are about three or four times the size of a wild primrose.
In fact one of the plants had a strange, rather putrid, green caste to its flower colour; in both the foliage was completely smothered by the far-larger-than-life flowers making them look noticeably unnatural; and they were offered as a mismatched pair in a lurid pink painted steel container – for £9.50 ($15.30). No thank you.
Then a few minutes later, in pot in a front garden, I spotted a true wild primrose, Primula vulgaris, plant looking delightful in a (slightly battered) blue-glazed pot (above, click to enlarge). I know which I’d rather have. And even in those pink pots, wild primroses would have looked good
The lesson? Bigger is not necessarily better.