DRYAD NURSERY NEWS AND NEW INTRODUCTIONS SUMMER 2023

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I’m putting the final touches to our summer list, hoping to have it available to subscribers in the middle of next week, more precise timing will be announced later. Orders will be by email as usual, no online ordering is available.

The main news this year is that after months of investigation online and uncounted phone calls, we can send ONLY NARCISSI to Northern Ireland and the EU, as well as the USA this summer.
The entire list is open to addresses in England Scotland and Wales, as last year.

We hope this will go smoothly, and it may just be a one-off, depending how it goes.  We will also be passing a large collection of snowdrops to our friends and colleagues at Esker Farm Daffodils this summer, with correct CITES accreditation, so watch out for some past Dryad specialities being available from them in the future, along with their wonderful collection of exhibition daffodils and other bulbs.

We have a number of exciting new cultivars of both snowdrops and daffodils this summer, which I will be introducing to you over the next couple of days. These will mostly be available only on ebay. Watch out for updates!

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In anticipation of our summer list due out next week, here is the promised news about our new introductions for 2023.
Starting with new additions to our popular Myths and Legends series of inverse poculiforms (ipocs for short).

DRYAD LETO

In Greek mythology, Leto was a goddess who caught Zeus’s perpetually wandering eye, and conceived twins by him. Knowing that Hera, wife of Zeus, was famously jealous and cruel in her vengeance against Zeus’s other lovers, she knew that she had to keep the pregnancy secret, and to find a place hidden from Hera in which to give birth. Her twin children were Apollo and Artemis.

Our Dryad Leto, lovely enough to catch Zeus’s attention, also holds a secret – she was deliberately bred to be a prospective mother of yellow inverse poculiforms (ipocs for short), having as her own parents Wendy’s Gold and Trym (the ancestor of all ipocs found in gardens). This means that when crossed with any yellow snowdrop, you have a chance of a yellow ipoc in the seedlings. This she has done in our breeding programme, when crossed with Spindlestone Surprise, and Dryad Venus, and hopefully some of our other seedlings that have not yet reached flowering size.

We are releasing Dryad Leto straight to our summer list, by-passing ebay, and at a special price, to encourage other growers to try breeding new varieties themselves, and to discover what fun it can be to see those first yellow marks on the outside of the first bud.
Hand pollinate with any yellow in your collection, or, if you trust the bees, plant her out amongst some yellow cultivars and hope they know what they’re doing (Really? You trust the bees?)

Beautiful in her own right, Dryad Leto’s flowers betray her amorous background with striking, large emerald hearts on both the inner and outer segments, gracefully pendant from stems 25cm high, displaying well above the arching, plicate leaves.

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DRYAD HERA

I have been getting requests for Dryad Hera after showing images of a it few years ago, and am delighted to finally have sufficient stock to release a few bulbs this year.

Hera was the queen of the gods in Greek mythology, wife to Zeus, with whom she had a very complicated and stormy relationship, characterised by Zeus taking many adulterous lovers, and Hera’s revenge upon them. If ever there was a disfunctional family, this was it! Hera is best known for her quite understandable jealousy against the women involved, although often they were tricked into it by Zeus. Bafflingly, Hera is the goddess of marriage.

Our Dryad Hera is very upright in both her stems and leaves, and shorter-growing than Zeus at only 20cm under glass. In contrast to Zeus’s bold stripe, Hera’s outer markings are appropriately broader and curvier, with a pronounced feminine ‘waist’, which also distinguishes her from Dryad Demeter, whose outer mark is very smooth in outline.

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DRYAD PEGASUS

This seedling, and DRYAD BELLEROPHON, have long been admired here at the nursery for their ‘flyaway’ outer segments, giving the impression that they are about to take flight. They have been named, appropriately, after Pegasus, the winged horse, and his rider, Bellerophon.

PEGASUS is one of the best-known characters in Greek mythology, having many adventures with his rider including slaying the Chimera. After being brought to Olympus, he was used to carry Zeus’ thunderbolts.
His snowdrop, Dryad Pegasus, spreads it’s wing-like outer segments widely, displaying the dark green inner marking in sharp contrast to the white margins of the outer segments. Growing to about 20cm under glass, the slightly arching plicate leaves are only half the height of the flowering stems, meaning the flowers appear to fly above the foliage.
The outer segments are twice as long as the inners, and deeply folded in half lengthways, while the side view shows the segments also curving upwards towards the apex, and a final flick at the end. The texture is waxy and corrugated lengthwise. The marks on the outer segment are a rich green, deep inverted U reaching to about halfway to the base, then a separate diffuse, apple-green central stripe.
The inner segments are not flared, and bear a deep green, sharply waisted mark for almost the entire length, except for a crisp white margin.

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DRYAD BELLEROPHON

Bellerophon, in Greek mythology, tamed and rode Pegasus using a magic bridle, and together they had many victories exploiting the fact that Pegasus could allow them to attack from above. Unfortunately, his arrogance persuaded him that he should reside among the gods on Olympus, and his pride was followed by him falling off attempting to get there, which some might say was divine justice!

DRYAD BELLEROPHON, his snowdrop, is similar in stature and demeanour to his steed, Dryad Pegasus, but the ‘wings’ spread less widely to about 45 degrees to the axis of the flower.
The outer segments are broad, softly folded lengthwise and uptilted at the apex, dimpled and corrugated in texture. The outer mark is an indistinct inverted U near to the apex, separated widely from the small, more diffuse and paler oval ending just before the long claw, which clearly reveals the inner mark.
The inner segments are shorter than the outers, and bear a double mark. The apical mark is a clear-cut inverted V, with a white margin around the sinus, while the basal mark is two diffuse ovals, usually joined by a narrow bridge, giving the impression of two fierce eyes peering out.

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DRYAD ARGUS

This unique little snowdrop is something quite different from our other Myths and Legends, a true eye-poc!
A deliberate cross between Galanthus fosteri x G. woronowii ‘Cider with Rosie’, it has a distinctive pair of eye spots on each outer segment.
It is named after Argus, who in Greek mythology, had many eyes looking in all directions, his all-round vision making him the perfect watchman, set to guard one of Zeus’s target females by the jealous Hera.

DRYAD ARGUS is a compact snowdrop growing to 15cm with glossy, bright green arching leaves. The upright stems carry the neatly conical flowers, each with the two ‘eyes’ on each outer segment.
The outers are spoon-shaped, with a long claw, and slight mucro at the apex, while the reverse shows a large green oval beyond the claw, broken by white veins and margin.
The shorter, triangular inner segments have a sharply defined, shallow dark green ‘bridge’ over the sinus, while on the reverse, this extends towards the base, gradually fading to white before reaching it.

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The Myths assembled!

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We are happy to finally be able to release some seedlings from our green breeding programme.
They will all be named for musical forms, to group them together, but there will only be a few clones selected for naming, as so many seedlings resemble the parents too closely. In other words, it will be a chamber orchestra rather than a philharmonic.

The first two members are sister seedlings, DRYAD CONCERTO and DRYAD SONATA, bred from G.elwesii ‘Eilys Elisabeth Hartley’ x ‘Rosemary Burnham’.

DRYAD CONCERTO more closely takes after her mother, Eilys Elisabeth Hartley, inheriting the beautiful overall shape, similar to a crinoline skirt flaring out from the claw, sometimes likened to an old-fashioned lightbulb. The daughter, though, has a longer apple-green mark covering the apical half of the segment, with a narrow white margin and white spot at the tip. The long claw is shaded pale green.
On a warm day, the outers will open widely to show the prettily marked inner segments, which are almost wholly bright emerald green, paling just before the base, and becoming deeper around the sinus. The narrow white margin reaches inwards towards the midline just above the sinus, forming a ‘waist’, and separating out the different shades of green.
Dryad Concerto grows to about 20cm in flower, with broad leaves arching outwards towards their tips typical of its elwesii lineage.

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DRYAD SONATA, in contrast to her sister, slightly favours her pollen parent, Rosemary Burnham, but is more heavily, and variously, marked with green. Similar in height to Dryad Concerto at 20cm, the leaves are broad, upright, and slightly twisted, with hooded tips.
The flowers are attractively bell-shaped, constricting into the long claw, with the margins of the distal half of the outer segments distinctively rolled upwards, giving the segment an unusual spear shape, or ‘quilled’ appearance.
The outer segment mark covers almost the whole of the surface, except for a prominent white spot at the apex, which is common to most of the seedlings from this cross. The deep apple-green colouring is solid at the shoulder and apex, dissolving into lines following the textured furrows in between.
The inner segments, similar to Dryad Concerto, are almost wholly bright emerald, darker over the sinus, and with a paler ‘waist’ constriction between the two shades.

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I will also remind you about Dryad nursery’s new autumn-flowering snowdrops: DRYAD PRINCESS, DRYAD DUCHESS, DRYAD COUNTESS and DRYAD EMPRESS – together the DRYAD ARISTOCRATS GROUP.
They are hybrids between G. reginae-olgae ‘Cambridge’ and my favourite small form of G. peshmenii, a deliberate cross made in 2013. The first flowers opened in October 2019, and it became clear that we had something very special.
The flowers were of heavy substance, with corrugated outer segments and a nice variation in height and inner markings. The bulbs were healthy and increased over the next two years, often giving more than one scape per bulb. The outstanding feature, though, was the strong, rich, sweet scent common to the seedlings, quite unlike the usual honey scent of the parents.
The leaves were just emerging at the time of flowering, so the flowers were presented well in their pots. Later, on emergence, the leaves showed the pale median stripe typical of G. reginae -olgae.
In the last three years of flowering, no seed has been set on any of the seedlings.
This autumn I cross pollinated the seedlings together. Some seeds were set, suggesting at least some are fertile, but considering the unusual texture of the flowers and the distinctive perfume, as well as the vigour of the seedlings, I feel confident of their hybridity.
The DRYAD ARISTOCRATS group are desirable and vigorous new additions to snowdrop collections, offering matchless large flowers of heavy substance and texture, easy to grow under glass with a dry summer rest, which will fill a greenhouse with a rich perfume on sunny autumn days.
There is a more complete description and more images in the  International Rock Gardener online magazine here:
https://www.srgc.net/documents/irg/221125094157IRG%20155.pdf

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And so to our new daffodils for 2023!

The first of our new babies is something a little different – the first of our hybrids using pollen from the fabulous Narcissus albimarginatus, of which I was honoured to be a temporary custodian, using its pollen on anything that would take it. Although few of the resulting seedlings inherited the hoped-for white rim to the corona, and then only as a pale rim, the main thing that they all have in common, and became the thing to check with each new seedling that flowered, is the wonderful scent characteristic of N. albimarginatus – not like any other narcissi that I grow, but rich and complex, almost rose-like. Unlike other daffodil scents such as the jonquills, I could happily be surrounded by their perfume without having to open a window or leave the room! The other character that alerted me to a probable successful hybrid, even before they flowered, was the usually swift increase in the number of bulbs.

AMBRIAL (12 Y-Y) is the child of N. rupicola subsp. marvieri × N. albimarginatus, and although it did not inherit the white corona rim, it does have the wonderful fragrance. The golden flowers, usually 1-2 per stem are slightly nodding, with an overlapping perianth, and small enough to be classed as miniature for exhibition. Flowering at about 20cm high under glass, with upright leaves, it makes a fine container specimen. I’ve not attempted to grow it outside as yet, but both its parents are hardy. The name is an anagram of MAR(vieri) and ALBI(marginatus).

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The latest addition to our MOON series of hoop petticoats is ERIS (10 W-W), selected for its upward facing white flowers with a particularly neat, pleated and rolled rim on short stems. The narrow perianth segments extend beyond the corona to give a starburst effect. The exserted stamens and style lend a cheeky touch!

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As a companion to my daughter’s namesake, ‘Little Jen’, comes another x rupidulus seedling named for her best friend – LITTLE CELINE. The two are similar in height and posture at 15cm high and nodding, but Little Celine’s flowers are a reverse bicolour, with the corona paler than the perianth. As a flower for exhibition, her dainty flowers have already earned prizes for me.

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This year I named two taller division 5 (triandrus) seedlings that have been delighting us with their scent later in the season in the greenhouse (although quite overpowering when the pots full have travelled in the car with us to shows).  They are GOLD BUNCH and her sister LEMON BUNCH, from N. triandrus subsp. pallidulus × N. fernandesii – a x incurvicervicus cross.
Lemon Bunch, at 25cm high, is slightly shorter than Gold Bunch, and as the names suggest, the colours distinguish them as well. Both are floriferous and increase well, flowering in April. They are both classed as miniature for exhibition.

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If you like the triandrus hybrids, but are averse to the scent, then LEMON PARFAIT is the one for you, being unscented. The dainty flowers are seemingly made out of translucent crystal, icy white and cool lemon, up to three florets per stem, and 25-30cm high under glass.