On 02/05/2012 11:39, kay wrote:
'Spider[_3_ Wrote:
;957656']
I adore cowslips and would love to have red ones .. perhaps I'll try
moving mine around the garden, just in case. I've got a batch of
plants
waiting for a home :~).


They grow easily from seed, and the seed is available - try Chiltern or
T&M. You'll probably have to go for mixed - ie all colours from orange
and bronze through to deep red, but you can select once you've got
flowers, chuck out the plants you don't like and divide the ones you do.






Oooh! That's interesting, Kay. I didn't think it was possible to get
coloured Cowslips, just the natural yellow form, but it's worth a
browse. Thank you. I'll check those sites out.

--
Spider
from high ground in SE London
gardening on clay

On Wed, 2 May 2012 14:53:02 +0100 (BST), wrote:

In article ,
Spider wrote:

I should have guessed you'd have a good google first.

Well, I started with my books, and then tried the Web :-)

I can't imagine where the brown colouring comes from. There are a few
brownish-reds in the auricula group, but that seems an unlikely source
for your intriguing cowslips. I do agree that the yellow is the better
colour. They've been a favourite of mine since childhood.

Well, brown is more-or-less an unsaturated form of the orange red
of the cowslips on the Wikipedia page, so I assume that there was
just a bit of chlorophyll or similar in the pigment. They weren't
brown, but a slightly mucky red - it's a very common colour in day
lilies that are claimed to be red.


I have a clump of reddish-brown cowslip type flowers which have been
in my garden for 20 years of more. I don't much like them, but they
obviously like the spot where I put them, when a friend gave them to
me. I've never seen any self-eedlings and the clump has not spread
much. I much prefer the wild cowslips and primroses.

Pam in Bristol

That's not quite right.

The cross between Primula vulgaris (primrose) and P. veris (cowslip) used to be called oxlip and is now known as false oxlip.

Primula elatior (oxlip) is a distinct species, and not a cross between the other two.

On 02/05/2012 18:15, kay wrote:
'Spider[_3_ Wrote:
;957682']

They still are called Oxlips, David. Primula elatior, a cross between
Primroses and Cowslips.


That's not quite right.

The cross between Primula vulgaris (primrose) and P. veris (cowslip)
used to be called oxlip and is now known as false oxlip.

Primula elatior (oxlip) is a distinct species, and not a cross between
the other two.





Oh. Really? I'll look into that. My wild flower book is rather
elderly. Thanks.

--
Spider
from high ground in SE London
gardening on clay

In article ,
Spider wrote:
On 02/05/2012 18:15, kay wrote:

They still are called Oxlips, David. Primula elatior, a cross between
Primroses and Cowslips.

That's not quite right.

The cross between Primula vulgaris (primrose) and P. veris (cowslip)
used to be called oxlip and is now known as false oxlip.

Primula elatior (oxlip) is a distinct species, and not a cross between
the other two.

Oh. Really? I'll look into that. My wild flower book is rather
elderly. Thanks.

It's not quite that simple. Stewart might know more, but my
understanding is that P. veris, vulgaris, elatior and perhaps a
few others are only marginally separate species. Natural
hybridisation is fairly common, though it rarely creates stable
colonies. Given my experience, a possibility is that they are
better regarded as semi-isolated gene pools within the same
species; at least one not-totally-clueless Wikipedia entry
favoured that view.

But, yes, there is a distinction between the true and false
lips, that was agreed by botanists to be the case only in the
19th century. Until then, all oxlips were regarded as a hybrids.
It is likely that many flower books repeated that until well
into the 20th century.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

According to Fitter et al, the false oxlip differs from the oxlip "it is not a carpeter, and also differs in its shorter stem, deeper yellow flowers. especially in the centre, the umbels not one sided, and the leaves more gradually tapered to the base". The oxlip is found wild only in bits of east anglia, though it's available commercially and I'm growing it in Yorkshire.

On 03/05/2012 08:47, wrote:
In ,
wrote:
On 02/05/2012 18:15, kay wrote:

They still are called Oxlips, David. Primula elatior, a cross between
Primroses and Cowslips.

That's not quite right.

The cross between Primula vulgaris (primrose) and P. veris (cowslip)
used to be called oxlip and is now known as false oxlip.

Primula elatior (oxlip) is a distinct species, and not a cross between
the other two.

Oh. Really? I'll look into that. My wild flower book is rather
elderly. Thanks.

It's not quite that simple. Stewart might know more, but my
understanding is that P. veris, vulgaris, elatior and perhaps a
few others are only marginally separate species. Natural
hybridisation is fairly common, though it rarely creates stable
colonies. Given my experience, a possibility is that they are
better regarded as semi-isolated gene pools within the same
species; at least one not-totally-clueless Wikipedia entry
favoured that view.

But, yes, there is a distinction between the true and false
lips, that was agreed by botanists to be the case only in the
19th century. Until then, all oxlips were regarded as a hybrids.
It is likely that many flower books repeated that until well
into the 20th century.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.




Thank you, Nick, I'll have a google. As you suggest, all my books are
out of date now, so googling will have to tide me over until I see an
affordable updated volume. It's a very interesting subject, and I wish
my grasp of botany and taxonomy was better.

--
Spider
from high ground in SE London
gardening on clay

On Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:29:15 UTC+1, Stewart Robert Hinsley wrote:
In message , writes

When we moved into this house in 1978, there were some primulas
that I took to be horticultural polyanthus, though with nearly
cowslip-shaped flowers. The leaves were right, the umbels were
generally multilateral, and the colours were yellow or dark red
(especially yellow in the centre and dark red elsewhere).

Recently, they have got a bit annoying, so I have moved the
survivors to our naturalised bulb area, but the bizarre thing
is that half of them now fit my books' descriptions of cowslips,
with yellow flowers with well-defined orange markings, one-sided
umbels and leaves truncated at the base. I am too rusty and old
to be sure whether they are appropriately scented.

My books and a Web searches leave me totally baffled as to what
horticultural polyanthus are botanically, and Wikipedia has a
picture of red cowslips that match what I have in appearance.
So have they bred themselves back to close to P. veris?

As Archie said of Mehitabel's kits, Boss, can such things be?

Did you mean SRH?

The BSBI use Primula x polyantha for polyanthus in general. Richards'
monograph on Primula (1993 edn) has Primula x tommasinii for Primula
veris x vulgaris, and Primula x pruhoniciana for Primula juliiae x
tommasinii. Primula elatior may also be involved in some clones.

So, polyanthus are hybrids between primroses and cowslips, with the
possible involvement of other species in some cases. Richards attributes
red cowslips to introgression from red-flowered subspecies of primrose.

I find breeding themselves back towards P. veris plausible.

An alternative is the P. veris introduced itself, and then outcompeted
the originals.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

--
Stewart Robert Hinsley

Nothing to add, only to refer Nick to the Richards book if he doesn't already have it. For others who love Primulas it's a lovely book even if you only 'read' the pictures. Some of the technical content might be hard going for non-botanists though.

Rod

In article 18226765.1206.1336066985499.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@vbmi19,
Rod wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 May 2012 21:29:15 UTC+1, Stewart Robert Hinsley wrote:

The BSBI use Primula x polyantha for polyanthus in general. Richards'
monograph on Primula (1993 edn) has Primula x tommasinii for Primula
veris x vulgaris, and Primula x pruhoniciana for Primula juliiae x
tommasinii. Primula elatior may also be involved in some clones.

Nothing to add, only to refer Nick to the Richards book if he doesn't
already have it. For others who love Primulas it's a lovely book even
if you only 'read' the pictures. Some of the technical content might
be hard going for non-botanists though.

Thanks to both for that. I don't own it, and it's not borrowable
from the, er, local library, so I would have to read it there. My
main interest was not in primulas as such, but at the apparent (and
it seems real) magnitude of undirected natural selection in a mere
30 years. I might have done some selection for colour when weeding,
but I assuredly haven't selected for leaf shape or umbel direction.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.