The woodlanders

Hugh Nunn fell in love with trilliums and erythroniums in his twenties. Val Bourne looks back on a life devoted to breeding the finest forms of these extraordinary plants

- Val Bourne

VERY few nurseries grow choice, seed-raised trilliums and erythroniums, purely because the tricky process of raising them from seed takes five years or more. The Lincolnshire-based Twelve Nunns Nursery, run by Penny Dawson, is the exception. Mrs Dawson is the daughter of Hugh Nunn, something of a horticultural polymath. Few realise the modest Mr Nunn revolutionised hellebore breeding in the same way that Florence Bellis did primular breeding with her Barnhaven and Cowichan strains. He created Harvington seed strains that come true to colour and type. This was no easy task: each one took at least eight years in development.

Mr Nunn’s real passions, however, are for trilliums and erythroniums, with which he fell in love in his early twenties when working as an improver gardener in the North Arboretum at Kew. Now aged 80, and supposedly retired, he is still hybridising and selecting trilliums and erythroniums in his daughter’s nursery. ‘A good hybrid inherits the best traits and is blessed with greater vigour,’ he explains.

Generally, erythroniums are easier to grow than trilliums when given light, but not deep, shade and friable soil. There are 20 species worldwide, but most of the elegant, gardenworthy ones occur on the western side of North America, on foothills not far from the Pacific coast. Their evocative American names—which include fawn lily and glacier lily—refer to the elegant way these plants flower as winter snows recede. Many have beautifully marked foliage, too.