Monday, April 14, 2014

/who is it? It's an Epimedium Mystery!



We have a very good collection of epimediums in the Asian Collection at the US National Arboretum. It's well labeled and supported by good records. So how did this happen? It seems to have snuck in somehow. Maybe it's a seedling, a cross-pollenated seedling. Anyway it isn't labeled, it isn't mapped, it doesn't match any of our other epimediums living or dead in our records.

It's very attractive and extremely cold resistant. This winter it was the only epimedium not to suffer any winter foliar burn.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This looks to be an F1 hybrid between Epimedium stellulatum and either E. lishihchenii or E. franchetii and likely appeared spontaneously in the garden. It was not one of the plants collected in the wild in the Wudangshan as I helped out with the ID of those plants at the time and nothing like this was included.

Hope this helps.
Darrell Probst

ChrisU said...

That would make sense. It's about five feet from a large clump of stellulatum and 30 feet from a colony of lishihchenii.

Thanks