Cyclamen

Great Aunt Lizzies house - in Main Street, Lambley

Seventy years ago, when I was twelve years old, I started working for my uncle Cyril. Not full-time of course but during school holidays and Saturday mornings. My uncle grew cut flowers, tomatoes, vegetables and pot plants on his five-acre smallholding called Castle Nursery. The nursery was bang in the centre of my village of Lambley, nestled in a valley in the east midlands of England. In addition to my uncle there were two aunts, my grandfather and a cousin all working in the business.

At the time I started working in the nursery my great aunt Lizzie lived in a house on the property that was built more than 400 years ago during the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. The house is a building of national importance and is a Grade 2 listed building on the National Heritage List for England.
My great aunt Lizzie was the tea maker for the staff. She would bring tea and the thick, home-made jam sandwiches to wherever we were working. No slow walk to staff tea rooms then. The sandwiches were wrapped in newspaper. The tea, with milk and lots of sugar already added, came in an enamel coffee pot and was served by my great aunt in enamel mugs. We ate our sandwiches and drank our tea squatting in the middle of flower fields.

In the nearby city of Nottingham there was a large undercover market which was open for five or six days a week. Most of the stalls were owned by local growers. My uncle was one such. He stocked his stall with produce grown on his Lambley property. As the market was open the year round, the stall holders needed a year-round supply of stock.

To cut a long story short, one of the winter crops grown at Castle Nursery were, what my uncle called “sykes”, the florist’s Cyclamen.

Mature Cyclamen tubers were bought from growers in the Netherlands or Belgium, potted up in late autumn and grown on in glass houses until they flowered in late January or early February when they could be taken to market.

These Cyclamen were large flowered but elegant strains of Cyclamen persicum. Sadly, this elegance has been lost in 21st century breeding. Commercial seed houses seem to be competing with each other to see who can beget the most bizarre colours and flower shapes.

Cyclamen persicum

In the wild, Cyclamen persicum can be found growing in north Africa, Crete, Rhodes, mainland Turkey through to Syria, Lebanon, the Holy Land and Jordan. The plants in our garden were raised from seed collected on Crete by the late Marcus Harvey. We grow this Cyclamen under olive trees in our dry climate garden where they have slowly, all too slowly, increased by self-sowing.

The exquisite beauty of Cyclamen persicum flowers growing wild in Palestine during World War Two bewitched a 4-year-old German boy, who alongside his family, was imprisoned in an internment camp by the British colonial power who controlled Palestine at the time. This infant would crawl under the camp’s barbed wire fence to pick wild flowers growing in the nearby countryside. Thirty years later he told me that one of the flowers he picked at that time was C. persicum.

Otto Fauser would go on to build one of the world’s greatest collections of rare bulbs in his Olinda garden in the Dandenong Ranges of Victoria. We were close friends for more than fifty years from the moment we met until his death earlier this year. Otto grew every known species of Cyclamen, all twenty of them.

Cyclamen coum

I grow half a dozen. One that does exceptionally well in our Central Highlands garden is Cyclamen coum. It grows wild in the coastal areas and nearby mountains of countries bordering the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Turkey and Crimea. Cyclamen coum has a further distribution in the mountains of south eastern Turkey through Syria and Lebanon to Israel and Palestine.

The round leaves of this species, some plain dark green others with silver patterning, appear in autumn. The rather squat flowers are produced, here at least, from early July until mid-spring. In the wild Cyclamen coum prospers in quite cool and damp areas, but here it grows equally well in hot, dry, sunny parts of the garden as in the damper, more shaded parts.

Cyclamen seeds are coated with a fleshy edible appendage which is attractive to some species of ants. The ants carry the seeds back to their nests dropping some on the way. They don’t eat the seed just the fleshy appendage. When Cyclamen flowers are pollinated their stems coil down to the soil surface in a cork screw like fashion. This action brings the seeds to within reach of the ants or just as likely protects the seed pods from grazing animals.
Cyclamen coum can be grown as a pot plant increasing in beauty as each year passes. It doesn’t do well if brought into the house though as its flower stems will soon elongate and flop over.

We will hopefully have some cyclamen seed available for purchase from Lambley in the coming months.