Daphne cneorum L.

An evergreen trailing shrub, producing a great number of long, slender, minutely downy branches, densely clothed with leaves, and forming a low, spreading mass under 1 ft high. Leaves oblanceolate, with a tapering base and broadly wedge-shaped apex, ending in a minute bristle-like tip, 3⁄4 to 1 in. long, 1⁄8 to 1⁄5 in. wide, dark green above, greyish beneath, glabrous. Flowers crowded in a dense terminal cluster, numerous, scarcely stalked; they are fragrant and rich rosy pink, the tube 3⁄8 in. long, very downy outside, the expanded part 3⁄8 in. across, with ovate-oblong lobes. Blossoms in May. Bot. Mag., t. 313.

Native of Europe from Spain to S.W. Russia; cultivated 1752. It is the best and most useful of the evergreen species, from all the rest of which grown in gardens it is distinguished by its lax, prostrate habit. It flowers with remarkable freedom, the leaves being almost entirely hidden by bloom. It likes a permanently moist root-run, and apparently thrives well in calcareous soil. Some of the healthiest plants I have seen in the London district were (some years ago) in one of the plots under the control of the London County Council on Plumstead Common, Kent. This place is on a limestone formation, and is perhaps 200 ft above the Thames. The plants had, apparently, treatment similar to that meted out to privets and such-like, but were in rude health. At the same time it succeeds splendidly in the R.H.S. Garden at Wisley, where the soil is a sandy peat. It is a good plan to layer the outer shoots by placing stones on them, as recommended for D. blagayana.

From the Supplement (Vol. V)

The derivative of ‘cneorum’, here used by Linnaeus as a noun-epithet, is explained under the genus Cneorum in Volume I.

var. pygmaea – For a discussion of the dwarf forms of D. cneorum, see Brickell and Mathew, op. cit., pp. 89–90. A beautiful pink-flowered dwarf form received an Award of Merit when shown by Messrs Ingwersen in 1983.

It should be added that there is a gold-margined clone of D. cneorum in cultivation.

† D. velenovskyi Halda – Previously identified as D. cneorum, this daphne occurs on Mount Vichren in Bulgaria and was described by the Czechoslovak authority J. Halda in 1981 (Preslia, Vol. 53, pp. 345–7). See also: Qtly Bull. Alp. Gard. Soc., Vol. 50, pp. 268–70 (1982).