IN June 1969—I was at university and most of you were still unborn—I bought a bag of cyclamen corms in Woolworths.
They were labelled C. neapolitanum, which was the name then given to the hardy autumn-flowering species that we now call C. hederifolium. I planted them in shallow trays, so that I could enjoy their flowers in our conservatory before planting them out later in the autumn. When they flowered, I noticed that their petals had little notches at their tips, a characteristic I hadn’t seen before.
My parents lived in Wiltshire and I knew Oliver Menhinick, the great plantsman who was then Director of Horticulture at Lackham, our county horticultural college. I asked Oliver if he’d ever seen cyclamen with a frilly edging before and he replied that, actually, my plants were a very rare species called C. mirabile, which came from a small area within that corner of southwest Anatolia that the Ancient Greeks called Phrygia.
Plant collection in Turkey was completely unregulated in those days and millions of bulbs and corms were dug up and exported every year, mainly to Dutch wholesalers who packaged them for retail. Which is how I came to buy them in Woolworths.
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