The camassia have risen, spearing into spring and soaring skyward to link us with the early days of summer. Their first ascending colour eclipses the last of the spring bulbs as the meadows quicken to swallow the Pheasant’s Eye narcissus. Spires that leave their fleshy foliage behind to blink one and then a succession of starry flowers. Each star lasts just a day as they fizzle up the stems, still ahead of the grasses – but not for long – to ride this pristine and to-be-savoured moment.
Camassia provide first height in a border, rising simultaneously with Thalictrum aquilegifolium and cow parsley. I have learnt a lesson or two over the years, having regretted planting the profligate Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’ in a border setting (not my own I might add, but a client’s) without having grown the plant for long enough myself to know its habits. The single form seeds into open ground if you do not deadhead it, so densely that you might have sown a lawn come the following spring. Seedlings that burrow fast into the crowns of anything that isn’t fast enough to eclipse their early growth, then forming a network of bulbs that are impossible to disentangle.
That was thirty years ago and my client has fortunately embraced and overlooked my error. We replanted the garden with plants that could cope with the equivalent of a wild garlic wood of white camassia and reduced it to a garden of two or three moments. The white hellebores that come before, which can cope with the camassia’s early rise and then Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ to muscle out the hole the camassia leave after they become dormant in the summer.
I know now that Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba Plena’, the semi-double form of the same plant, is sterile and completely safe to use in a mixed border and, importantly, that the profligate single form will gently seed in the competitive environment of a damp meadow. Seeding enough to find its own place where the soil is damp or where the yellow rattle has opened up the sward. A gentle balancing act that in time allows a community to develop the way it wants be. I grow it on the back banks near the Malus transitoria, where it is timed to flower with Gladiolus communis ssp. byzantinus in about a week’s time.
I grow several camassia here and enjoy their presence for the month or so they are in flower, as one variety follows the next. The first group to flower are the Camassia leichtlinii subsp. suksdorfii (Caerulea Group) of which there are many variants. ‘Lady Eve Price’, which was kindly gifted by Graham Gough of Marchant’s Hardy Plants, is the earliest to flower here. A sumptuous dark, royal purple. I have risked it in the borders, as it coincides perfectly with primrose yellow Molly-the-witch peonies and the licorice-leaved Lunaria annua ‘Chedglow’. I have grown it close to the path to be able to carefully deadhead the stems once they go to seed, but I can see that I have already missed a couple, for there is a rash of new seedlings this spring which look like young leeks. Give me ten years and I may well be cursing, but for now I am hand weeding whilst they are tiny.
Camassia leichtlinii ssp. suksdorfii ‘Electra’ (main image) is, by contrast, safe for being sterile. Perhaps this is why it puts all its energy into being the largest grower of them all. It is a clear, sky blue and I have it teamed to either side of the path with a stand of tonally similar Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’, which it precedes and overlaps with. Its new growth is one of the catalysts to get the garden cut down in late February, the great heartiness of strappy leaves being so very welcome at the end of winter that you want to clear away the old. The bulbs are the size of your fist and, for the past few years since they were planted, we have debated whether they are out of scale, for it is surely the loudest guest at the spring party. As they have matured and the clumps increased in size, they have spread their energy over more spikes of flower. This year these are less steroidal and sit much better with their companions. I am pleased not to have to move them, because once planted camassia do better for not being disturbed.
Though I do not grow it here, but in the confines of my mother’s little garden, Camassia leichtlinii subsp. suksdorfii ‘Maybelle’ is also sterile and a good garden plant to come ahead of later perennials in a mixed border; asters, persicaria and plants that will entirely cover for their absence when they become summer dormant. ‘Maybelle’ is two weeks later than ‘Electra’, flowering in mid-May and smaller by half, if not more, at 60cm. It is an easy, purplish-blue.
Camassia like moisture in spring and can cope with heavy wet ground, as long as it dries and does not remain wet for the summer period, so I grow most of ours here in our meadow areas and try to follow the ground that holds the moisture, noting that my C. cusickii do less well in the soil that dries too fast on the slopes and under the Malus hupehensis.
Finding the perfect spot sometimes takes time and, though I only introduced Camassia quamash last year, I have already noticed that it might be outstripped by our prolific grassland for being the shortest of them all at just a foot. Before America was settled the Camas was gathered and used as a food plant by the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, where it was pit roasted or boiled. The Camas prairies, which lit up blue for mile upon mile, were managed by the native peoples until settlers released hogs to clear the ground and modern day agriculture followed to disturb this careful equilibrium and subsistence. The Camas disputes with the settlers who took the land represented the beginning of an irreversible end.
When I was running trials to see what worked here before making the garden, I planted a line of Camassia leichtlinii ‘Amethyst Strain’ after seeing a magical stand of these mercurial variants on the Avon Bulbs stand at the Chelsea Flower Show. The by-product of a breeding programme to select nameable forms, the bulbs were then sold as a mix of unknowns, which emerged in anything from not-quite-grey and just-pink-white, through dusky violet, ice-blue, dirty pink and the deepest royal purple. They went on to be sold under the name of Avon Stellar Hybrids.
I saved seed from the original row, which still pops up phoenix-like in the new garden from the site of my trial ground, to spear rather beautifully through giant fennel foliage in a chance coupling with Polygonatum verticillatum. The seed-raised plants flowered after about five years and are now beginning to settle into the damp banks on the ditch, where I planted them two years ago. This year I am marking my favourites for seed collection to continue a strain here because, now that Avon Bulbs has sadly closed for business, they are no longer available.
One day, since this is another long-term project, I plan for a Camas field here of amethysts, where no two are the same and where, for a week or ten days, this place becomes a bejewelled focus.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 11 May 2024
