Description
The story starts with a very robust, pale pink Erythronium clone; Erythronium Pink Beauty which was originally selected from wild populations by Carl Purdy many years ago. Purdy wrote in Flora & Sylva that Pink Beauty was either a localised form or natural hybrid population with californicum or oregonum. It clearly shows characters from both revolutum and californicum (or perhaps oregonum).
Whatever the exact parentage, Erythronium Pink Beauty is an excellent garden plant, producing flowers freely and these inherit excellent characters from both parents, but seemingly no bad habits. Importantly this F¹ cross also produces fertile seed and it can thus be further raised from seed. These F² offspring can revert towards either parent in some or many characters and they have, in the past, produced such excellent garden forms as Kinfauns Pink, Natalie, Rosalind and perhaps Knightshayes Pink.
We are offering here flowering-sized, seed-raised F² progeny of Erythronium Pink Beauty in mixture. The mix totally unselected and we haven’t taken out any special ones or marked anything. We can’t even send you ‘pink ones’ or ‘white ones’ as they are sent when dormant. It is a pot-luck selection flowers range from creamy-white, resembling Erythronium californicum White Beauty right through to deep pink-flowered plants which look like wide-petalled forms of revolutum (though with californicum throat markings, just like mum). We have illustrated the two extremes, both from our stock however the mix contains everything in between as well as these.
This is a very good and adaptable plant for the garden in half shade and a humus enriched soil. We have noticed that the latest flowering plants from this stock are still in bloom some 2 weeks after the flowering of the parent plants, E. Pink Beauty, which is more even and consistent in its flowering, as might be expected from a clone.
