Description
In 1990 a “bluebell” was found in north western Spain that did not apparently match any of the known species. This was subsequently named as Hyacinthoides paivae by Santiago Ortiz and Juan Rodríguez-Oubiña in 1996. The name paivae honours Jorge Américo Rodrigues de Paiva, a Portuguese botanist at the University of Coimbra. Hyacinthoides paivae is part of an informal grouping of related spewcies within Hyacinthoides, comp[rising H. non-scripta (UK), H. hispanica (Spain) and H. cedretorum (Morocco).
In the wild this grows in Oak- and Pine-woods with an underbrush of Cistus and Erica, but it is apparently known also from grasslands and coastal cliffs.
It has a whorl of narrow, basal leaves, typically 6-8 (2-12 are the recorded extremes) and up to 20 or so flowers on a 20-40cm tall stem. In good light, the leaves sit in a tight rosette and are short, as is the flower stem. We have noted that most bulbs produce 2 or even 3 flower stems each. The flowers are of a reasonable size and are of a nice, pure blue, looking quite like a good, deeper blue version of H. italica (with which it was at first confused) though that plant has larger flowers and broader leaves than H. paivae. (incidentally H. hispanica also differs in having longer, narrower, unscented, bell-shaped flowers.) There is a faint, barely detectable, fragrance in H. paivae, reminiscent of some plastics when they get warmed, but this is a “lift the pot to your nose” or “get down on your knees” faint fragrance.
Growth is easy in the garden and in a pot, and I suspect that, due to the similarity between the climates of n.w. Spain and poarts of the UK, this will grow in almost any situation in which the English bluebell thrives.
I do not believe the picture supposedly of H. paivae on Wikipedia to be correct (it appears to be an English Bluebell, H. non-scripta) , instead check out the accurate pictures on Virboga and ours below
Introduced to our lists May 2020.
