Description
(Erythronium Pink Beauty)
A very robust, pale pink clone (these are vegetative divisions) originally selected from wild populations by Carl Purdy many years ago. It is clearly a wild hybrid containing genes from both revolutum and californicum (or perhaps oregonum). It may have originated from a primary hybrid or most likely as an introgressed population.
It has large, strong flowers with noticeably broad petals, a trait inherited from the white parent as revolutum has noticeably slender petals. The excellent leaf markings suggest, to me, that the white parent could perhaps have been oregonum rather than californicum, based on the former usually having darker and more strongly marked leaves, but this is a suggestion, not a fact and it is based only on oregonum plants which I have seen in horticulture. Whatever the white parent was it brought with it a rusty brown throat ring and a yellow throat (found in both of the putative white parents). The base of the petals is yellow with a small pale zone, faintly dotted with orange-caramel spots.
The revolutum parentage brings pink to the flower and the strongly recurved petals are both wider and more attractive than pure revolutum and they are of a good soft pink. The plant has a very attractive poise.
Carl Purdy wrote in Flora & Sylva that Pink Beauty was either a localised form or natural hybrid population with californicum or oregonum. In horticulture it has been much confused in the past, mostly with revolutum, but the differences are now unravelled and this stock is the true plant.
This is a very good form for the garden in half shade and a humus enriched soil, one of the best.
