If you want colour…

The spectacular candelabra primula is surprisingly easy to grow, says Charles Quest-Ritson, as long as you can offer it damp soil or a stream edge and a little shade

PRIMULAS are amazing. No genus of ornamental plants has so many species of such diverse origins. Consider tiny Primula egaliksensis. It lives in soggy hollows above the Arctic permafrost. Then, ponder P. verticillata, which is a yellow giant at home on mountainous cliffs in Saudi Arabia. Such different habitats, such different plants, but both of them primulas. There are more than 500 Primula species, but only four are native to the British Isles—primroses, cowslips, oxlips and P. scotica, our own bird’s-eye primula, endemic to the far north of Scotland. Mainland Europe has another 29 species, most of them true Alpines. But it is to eastern Asia that we must look for the most spectacular garden plants—the candelabra primulas, whose flowers are tiered up around a slender stem, whorl after whorl,…

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Country Life (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 12, 2025

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