Description
Cultivated stocks with this name are awash with incorrect identifications and hybrids. The vast majority are simply not correctly named. The same is true of the internet where illustrations show these same, wrongly-named, stocks.
The plant that we are offering here agrees very well with the original botanical description and the name has been applied in an attempt to define its genuine nature. It is only 10-12 cm tall with very few leaves (2-3 per raceme) which are 7-9 cm long and about 0.6 cm wide. The inflorescence is dense and very short, reaching 2cm at the most. The individual flowers are half the size of armeniacum (which is the plant most frequently mis-identified as aucheri).
The colour is of a purer, slightly paler blue than in armeniacum but there is a quite amazing differentiation between the colours of the fertile rich blue flowers and the larger, inflated, almost white sterile flowers in this stock. Colour variation is well known in this species and colouring generally is not constant across the range of variation of all true aucheri).
This is cultivated material traceable to the Pontus Mountains of S. Turkey. It does well in the garden, or in pots, without becoming rampant.
The illustration is of the exact plants in our stock.
