Daphne petraea Leybold

A tiny evergreen shrub 3 to 5 in. high, forming a low tuft of gnarled twigs. Leaves crowded, hard and leathery, narrowly obovate or oblong, tapered towards the base, obtusely pointed or rounded at the tip, thickened at the margins, and triangular in section, 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 in. long, 1⁄16 to 1⁄12 in. wide, not stalked, dark green. Flowers rich glowing pink, fragrant, produced in June in terminal clusters of about four blossoms; the tube of the flower is slenderly cylindrical and covered with fine down; across the spreading oval lobes the flower is 1⁄4 to 1⁄3 in. in diameter.

Native of the mountains west of the northern end of Lake Garda, where it now inhabits inaccessible cliffs of dolomitic rock, safe from the depredations of greedy collectors, who have exterminated it in its more easily reached stations. When the first edition of this work was published the most successful cultivator of this lovely alpine shrub was Reginald Farrer, who used to show little bushes grown in pots at the Temple Show in London, almost covered with blossom. In recent years specimens equally fine have been exhibited at the R.H.S. Hall.

It was in the year that this work was first published, in 1914, that Dr Jenkin and Robert Tucker collected the parent of the clone ‘Grandiflora’, which has larger flowers than the forms previously cultivated and has now almost displaced them in cultivation. (For a coloured illustration see Journ. R.H.S., Vol. 91, fig. 117 – of a fine potted specimen grown by Mrs Greenfield of Epsom.)

Propagation is usually achieved by grafting on to seedling stocks of D. mezereum, but evergreen species are also used as the stock and are perhaps preferable. Cuttings, though they strike readily enough, do not grow or flower so well as grafted plants. D. petraea is perfectly hardy and will grow well in the open ground if given a place in full sun with a deep and moist root-run in gritty soil with lime added. Its full beauty and delicious scent is, however, best enjoyed when it is grown as a pot-plant. For its cultivation the reader will find detailed guidance in an article by Will Ingwersen in Bull.A.G.S., Vol. 20, pp. 71–73, and in Frank Barker, The Cream of Alpines.

From the Supplement (Vol. V)

† D. × hendersonii Hodgkin ex Brickell & Mathew – This name has been given to a natural hybrid between D. petraea and the related D. cneorum, found by Mr W. Henderson and Mr (later Sir) Arthur Hill in a valley west of Lake Garda in 1930 (The Garden (Journ. R.H.S.), Vol. 101, p. 550 (1976) and see further in Brickell & Mathew, p. 112).