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Bergenias: from disdain to esteem
Jan
Photo of the house as it is now, with the garden gone to wrack and ruin.
I came to Bergenias rather late in life, although my first contact with them was in the mid-1950s. It was my first paid gardening job. I had worked on my uncle’s nursery when I was younger, but when I was 14 years old, my grandfather gave my parents a large, not particularly beautiful, Victorian house, a mile or so from the village. On the opposite side of the road from this house was a small terrace. A retired soldier, who had lost both of his legs during World War One, lived in one and he needed help in his garden. I worked for him for two days a year. During late spring I filled his whole front garden with his beloved Gladiolus corms, and during autumn I was digging them up again so that they could be safely stored until the following year.
On all four sides of the Gladiolus patch was an edging of Bergenias. I wasn’t captivated.
Later, when first in Australia in the early 1960s, I saw Bergenias in many an old garden, always scruffy and unloved.
It wasn’t until the 1970s when I became friends with Otto Fauser, a master gardener as well as a master pastry chef, that I saw just how beautiful Bergenias could be if you had a good variety, planted in the right spot. Thriving in Otto’s garden, under a giant mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans, which loomed threateningly over his Olinda house, was a handsome large-leaved Bergenia. It had been given to Otto by Marshall Mitchell, a gardening Gippsland dairy farmer, who grew it from seed collected from Bergenia ‘Ballawley’. This highly-rated variety was raised at Ballawley Park in Dublin some time prior to the 1950s. Its leaves, the largest of any in the genus, are a very glossy green. Otto gave me a plant, which I grew rather badly for many years in my Central Highlands garden.
Around two decades ago, whilst visiting my late sister’s renowned London garden, I saw a superbly grown Bergenia ciliata thriving in a terracotta pot.
On returning home to Lambley, I potted up my Bergenia ‘Ballawly Hybrid’ into a large terracotta pot and placed it in a dark corner under the verandah at my front door. Well, it has thrived for twenty years in the same pot, growing grander with each passing year. The cuneate glossy green leaves, redolent of a fiddle leaved Ficus, are now huge, some 45cm long and 25cm wide. Its crimson pedicles add to the beauty. The plant itself is now 150cm wide.
Last winter I potted up a Bergenia ciliata. Whilst it has done well in a garden setting since I imported it from the late Beth Chatto’s wonderful nursery in Essex, it was nowhere near as splendid as my sister’s, as I remembered it from so many years ago.
As I write this note early in the new year, my potted Bergenia ciliata, fine hairs covering every surface of its 35cm diameter round leaves, looks stunning.
Bergenia ciliata
Bergenia ‘Ballawley’