Breeding Rosemary's Babies

ROSEMARY VEREY, the much-missed grande dame of English gardening, used to say ‘a garden that isn’t deadheaded is like a pretty girl with dirty fingernails’.

- Mark Griffiths

By and large, her Cotswold idyll Barnsley House was rigorously manicured, but not everything was all of the time. Two plants she gave to me arose there from self-sown seeds. Obviously, their parents cannot have been deadheaded.

One is a variegated mutation of Geranium phaeum that looks too much like the victim of a milk shaking for my tastes. I persist with it nonetheless, as a keepsake and curio.

The other, altogether more desirable, is Paeonia delavayi. It began life as a seedling under one of two specimens of this Chinese tree peony in Barnsley’s Temple Garden. Mrs Verey pulled it out of the ground for me, having seen through my politely repressed coveting.

Over the years, it has proved unlike its mother plant and the second specimen in the Temple Garden. Its foliage is more finely cut and retains the ruddy flush of youth for longer, and its flowers are deep, glowing copper rather than shimmering maroon. Possibly, some other tree peony sired it. More probably, it falls within the spectrum of P. delavayi, a highly variable species. We simply call it Rosemary’s Baby —and devilishly good it is, too.