Statice tatarica L.

Horticultural & Botanical History

Introduced to Britain in 1731.  [JD].  ‘With the exception of the Thrift, which is generally consigned to do duty as “edgings,” and a few showy green-house species, the genus Statice has found little favour of late with cultivators; yet it contains many plants of singular beauty and interest.  Of these the palm must be given to the Canary Island species, introduced by the late M. Bourgeau, which were once the ornaments of a house at Kew devoted to plants loving the dry climate of the South of Europe (see Bot. Mag. tab. 3701, 3776, 4125, 5753, 5762), but which have long since “gone out of cultivation,” S. Iolfordii, Hort., remaining as almost the only representative of the group.  Amongst the South-Eastern European ones are many hardy kinds of remarkable beauty, such as the subject of the present plate, whose flowering-corymbs (of one plant) form together rounded masses a yard in diameter of delicate sprays studded with ruby-coloured flowers, each set in a silvery calycine cup; than which a prettier floral object cannot well be conceived.  It is a native of saline districts in the South-East of Europe, from Dalmatia and Hungary eastward through Bulgaria and S. Russia to the Crimea and Siberia east of the Ural Mountains.  A careful comparison of the specimens cultivated at Kew as S. tatarica, and here figured, inclines me to think that this is not the common form of that species, of which the numerous Herbarium specimens which I have examined show denser closer-set flowers, and that, but for the shape of the leaves, it would be referable to the variety angustifolia of Boissier, which has a more glabrous calyx and usually one-flowered spikelets, and is the S. Besseriana, Roem. and Schult., of which there is a poor figure in Reichenbach’s Iconographia with the slender sprays and distant flowers of our plant.

S. tatarica was introduced into England in 1731 by Philip Miller, and is described in the first edition of his Dictionary as Limomium 5; it is perfectly hardy, flowers in June and July, and remains long in bloom.’  [BM t.6537/1881].

History at Camden Park

The only reference is a handwritten note in an 1850 catalogue.  [MP A2947A].  Certainly grown in the gardens at this time.

Notes