Root planner

I HAVE a house plant that will be 50 years old in April. We used to call it Setcreasea purpurea—in fact we still do— but the RHS tells us that we should use the older name of Tradescantia pallida ‘Purpurea’, which is almost as grim as its common name of purple spiderwort.

It has thick, intensely purple leaves, rather like a dense and compact wandering sailor (which is what the botanists say it is). I was given it as a cutting from her garden by Norah Warre, a wonderful plant lover, then 94 years old, who lived at Villa Roquebrune near Menton. Warre said that Graham Sutherland had greatly admired it when he came to lunch and she had given him some pieces to root. ‘And, you know,’ she said, ‘it really is a rather Graham Sutherland sort of colour, is it not?’

My cutting rooted in a glass of water on a windowsill. I potted it up and it grew into the vigorous trailing houseplant that I still admire. Actually, I no longer have the exact plant, because, in the following winter, I took cuttings of it, and repeated the process, so that my current plants of it are the 50th generation of vegetatively propagated descendants of Warre’s cutting. I have given away many potfuls over the years and this summer I will use it as a bedding plant, too. But it was my first experience of rooting cuttings in water—the first of many surprises over the years.