A primrose is not just a pretty plant, it’s clever too. Val Bourne explains

Spring has had an early flourish this year and I’m sure many of us are praying that winter stays away in April, because so much is above ground already.

For weeks now I have been enjoying the primroses as much as the bees, and my five-year old grandson James took me down his garden and proudly showed me a clump of yellow primroses (Primula vulgaris). I like to think he may become a gardener one day!

These bee-friendly flowers epitomise spring and their name ‘prima rosa’ is derived from first rose of the year — primarole. They have been celebrated in literature for centuries. In Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale (circa 1380) the wife was a “primerole blisful on to see”. Many associated these fresh-faced flowers with young girls in their first flowering. Shakespeare saw the primrose rather differently, however. He talks about the primrose path of dalliance, somewhere that led to a wasteful life of excess, because in summer the leaves become large and coarse. Ophelia, speaking in Hamlet, uses the phrase about her brother Laertes as he lectures her, somewhat hypocritically, about a virtuous life.

Primroses are clever plants. They enlarge their leaves to shade out competition, which makes many of them unsuitable companions for treasures such as rare snowdrops, trilliums or hepaticas. They have two different flower forms. Some flowers of P. vulgaris are pin-eyed, with a prominent style held above short stamens. Others are thrum-eyed, with long stamens held above a short style.

When the bee hones in on the nectar at the base of the flower, pollen is picked up from the long stamens of the thrum-eyed and distributed on the tall pin-eyed flowers as the bee travels from one to another. This short and tall arrangement ensures lots of genetic diversity because the short-stamened flowers tend to be self-fertile whilst the long-stamened flowers normally need an insect to set seeds.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) presen-ted these dimorphic differences to the Linnean Society on November 21, 1862, although it was something that country children must have noticed as they threaded them together to make garlands. Darwin spent many hours breeding and hybridising primroses, but interesting forms had been about since Elizabethan times. One form called hose in hose, with one flower sitting inside the other, referred to the practice of gentlemen wearing two pairs of hose under their doublets to counteract the winter cold.

About 20 years ago a lady in the Czech Republic bred a modern strain of hose in hose primulas — now called P. X tommasinii ‘You and Me‘ in our country. I was given some plants about seven years ago and still have them. The only commercial source seems to be seeds from Thompson and Morgan and for many years they did a mixture of colours. I raised several from seed and have a particularly good strong-pink that’s clashing horribly with my colony of Narcissi cyclamineus. This year Thompson and Morgan are selling You and Me Blue. Twelve seeds cost £1.89.

Other Elizabethan specialities had a ruff of green leaves right beneath the flower — rather like the starched ruff between doublet and beard. These were called ‘Jack in the Green’ or ‘Jack in the Pulpit’. The best modern example is the cream-white ‘Dawn Ansell’, bred by Doctor Cecil Jones of Llanelli — the most prominent British hybridiser. Doubles were also highly popular and some think that the loose lilac flowers of Primula vulgaris ‘Lilacena Plena’ (syn, ‘Quaker’s Bonnet’) may have been around for hundreds of years.

My favourite, though, is ‘Francisca’ a green primula with ragged petals that I bought because I have a daughter called Fran. It was spotted by a Canadian gardener called Francisca Darts, growing on a traffic island in Surrey, British Columbia. The cool maritime climate of British Columbia is similar to many parts of Britain, so primroses grow well there.

It was all down to the bees, no doubt.