Lewisias are beautiful plants that I include, along with ornamental sweet peas, in my litany of horticultural failure.\u00a0 A few years ago, I was smitten by a lovely little pink-flowered lewisia that I saw at a plant sale.\u00a0 I thought I understood its needs, so I brought it home and planted it in a reasonably sunny raised bed, just behind a rock wall.\u00a0 The drainage in the spot seemed perfect and since I never watered anything in that bed, I figured the plant would be immune from the most frequent cause of lewisia death\u2014too much wetness.<\/p>\n
My little lewisia flourished in the first year and even bloomed in the second year. Then, with no warning, it died.\u00a0 I planted a hardy geranium in its place and thought no more about it.<\/p>\n
But plant failures have a habit of coming back to haunt you and this one returned last week when I got a \u201csneak peak\u201d e-mail from Terra Nova, the innovative breeder and wholesale nursery in Canby, Oregon.\u00a0 Terra Nova is famous for adding color to the garden, having introduced countless varieties of heuchera with leaves in just about every shade of the foliar rainbow.\u00a0 They also specialize in extending the color range of well-loved garden stalwarts, and the Terra Nova catalog features myriad echinacea and coreopsis, to name a few, in new, vibrant shades and forms.<\/p>\n
Now, Terra Nova has turned its attention to lewisia, sometimes also known by the evocative nickname \u201ccliff maid\u201d.\u00a0 This is probably a natural fit, since the genus Lewisia is native to the northwestern United States.\u00a0 The genus name comes courtesy of Captain Meriwether Lewis, friend of Thomas Jefferson and co-leader of the Lewis and Clark team that explored portions of the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest from 1804 to 1806.\u00a0 It was Lewis who discovered the first of the 20 or so lewisia species, bitterroot or Lewisia rediviva, in 1806.\u00a0 The Bitterroot Mountain range that runs between Montana and Idaho is named after the plant, which is also the state flower of Montana.<\/p>\n
Terra Nova\u2019s new lewisia, trademarked under the name Constant, is, like all new plants these days, part of a series.\u00a0 It is sold under the name Constant Coral, for its coral-shaded petals edged in white or palest peach.\u00a0 Like most commercially available lewisias, it is a cultivar of Lewisia cotyledon, a species native from Oregon\u2019s Siskiyou Mountains to northern California.\u00a0 Rising from a rosette of long, vaguely spoon-shaped, succulent leaves, the plants are eight to 12 inches tall when in flower and equally wide.\u00a0 The blooms appear on branched stems in shades of white, pink and yellow, with petals featuring color gradations that make them seem to shine.\u00a0 Breeders have taken the cotyledons to new heights, broadening their color ranges to include orange and peach shades, like Constant Coral.<\/p>\n
The flowers are so luminous that the plants practically beg to be cultivated, but that\u2019s the rub.\u00a0 I am not the only one to have problems growing lewisia successfully.\u00a0 Over the millennia, the plants have adapted to a very specific set of conditions.\u00a0 As mountain dwellers they tend to set up housekeeping in rock crevices, where they thrive in soil of low fertility and very good drainage.\u00a0 They like sunshine, but don\u2019t always care for afternoon sun.\u00a0 Winters must be relatively dry to suit them, because they are prone to stem rot.\u00a0 It is no wonder that some of the best specimens are grown in cool greenhouses where moisture can be tightly controlled.<\/p>\n
But what of the average gardener who believes the Terra Nova promotional copy and buys one of their new Constant Coral lewisias? \u00a0The company promises \u201cexcellent survival in pots and soil.\u201d\u00a0 Presumably that means that the Constant series has been bred to be a bit more tolerant of normal garden conditions than some earlier varieties and hybrids.\u00a0 Ashwood Nurseries, an English firm that specializes in lewisias, shows a gorgeous photo of a rock wall with healthy, blooming plants bursting out of all the crevices.\u00a0 This gives me hope.\u00a0 Maybe instead of planting my next lewisia in back of the rock wall, I should enlarge one of the crevices and plant it in the rock wall.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth a try.\u00a0 Some authorities also recommend siting lewisia on north facing slopes, as this ensures both great drainage and the kind of light conditions the plants favor.<\/p>\n
As with all promotional copy, the Terra Nova lewisia blurb promises that it \u201cblooms and reblooms from spring to fall\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 I hope that is true, because Constant Coral is a thing of great beauty.<\/p>\n
Occasionally when I catch myself in the garden center gazing longingly at a package of ornamental sweet pea seeds, I have to remind myself about past failures with the sweet-smelling lathyrus clan.\u00a0 The jury is still out on lewisia.\u00a0 I have only failed with it once and that might have been an anomaly.\u00a0 I also hate garden failure and am willing to risk money on another chance at a difficult but lovely plant.<\/p>\n
Of course, I could just move to Oregon, buy a mountain cabin and plant lots of lewisias on the north-facing slopes around my new home.\u00a0 But that does seem a bit extreme.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll just install a test plant in the rock wall out back.\u00a0 If you want to try your own lewisia experiment, you will probably find Constant Coral at better garden centers and nurseries this spring.\u00a0 Look for the Terra Nova plant tag.\u00a0\u00a0 ForestFarm at Pacifica also carries two lewisia varieties, both of them beautiful.\u00a0 They are at PO Box 1, 14643 Watergap Road, Williams, Oregon 97544; www.forestfarm.com<\/a>.\u00a0 Free print catalog for U.S. customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lewisias are beautiful plants that I include, along with ornamental sweet peas, in my litany of horticultural failure.\u00a0 A few years ago, I was smitten by a lovely little pink-flowered lewisia that I saw at a plant sale.\u00a0 I thought I understood its needs, so I brought it home and planted it in a reasonably … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[230,1587,1583,1586,1584,1582,737,590,1585],"class_list":["post-2057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-alpine-plants","tag-ashwood-nurseries","tag-cliff-maids","tag-constant-coral","tag-lewis-and-clark-expedition","tag-lewisia-cotyledon","tag-perennials","tag-rock-garden-plants","tag-terra-nova"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2058,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions\/2058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}