Desperate Aroids – The adventures of Phallicity

The spring garden at JLBG has a number of phallic moments if you’re lucky enough to catch them. Here are a few of our favorites. Below is a color echo we created, using Pig’s Butt Arum (Helicodiceros muscivorus) and Salvia x nemorosa. We’re sure you’ll want to recommend this combination for everyone in your HOA.

Helicodiceros muscivorus

It’s cousin, Dracunculus vulgaris has also been putting on a show recently. Although the typical red maroon-flowered forms won’t flower for another week or two, the rare white-flowered forms, native only to a small region of Crete, are stunning now.

Dracunculus ‘Spring Bling’ is an Alan Galloway hybrid with a creamy spathe, with a blush purple flush, and black spadix.

Dracunculus vulgaris ‘Spring Bling’

Below is another of Alan’s crosses that we’ve named Dracunculus ‘White Tux’ with a stunning white spathe and contrasting black spadix.

Dracunculus vulgaris ‘White Tux’

Dracunculus ‘White Rhino’ is the most vigorous of all the white-flowered clones we grow. This is yet another Alan Galloway selection, rescued from Alan’s garden, after he passed away at the all too early age of 60 years.

Dracunculus vulgaris ‘White Rhino’

A few years before Alan passed, we were chatting one day about crazy plant breeding projects, and Alan mentioned that he was going to try crossing Arum with Helicodiceros. I told him I suspected he might have better luck crossing Helicodiceros with Dracunculus, since they intuitively seemed to be a better match. He mentioned that both would be in flower in his garden shortly, so he’d be on the case.

Thanks to Alan’s meticulous breeding work, the cross was successful, and three seed eventually germinated. For several years, the foliage of the seedlings looked so similar to Helicodicerous, we both assumed that it was not actually a hybrid. Finally, the year prior to his death, the first of the three seedlings finally flowered, and indeed, he had been successful in creating a bi-generic hybrid, x Helicunculus gallowayii. The foliage, spadix surface appearance, and the flower orientation resembles Helicodiceros. The spathe and spadix are both much longer, the color is more intense and the spathe much more wavy and canoe-shaped, thanks to the Dracunculus parent.

All three seedlings were rescued, but so far, only the original clone has flowered. This week, as it opened, we are once again reminded of Alan’s amazing contributions to the horticultural world, with the flowering of his namesake.

x Helicunculus gallowayii

Adding Vulgarity to the Garden

We love “vulgar” plants, which are good for providing unexpected shrieks from garden visitors. One of our favorite plants for evoking such moments is the European native, Dracunculus vulgaris. For those who took Latin in school, you’ll know that the English translation of the Latin name is Vulgar Dragon’s Butt. This fascinating spring ephemeral is native to very rocky, dry sites in the Southwest corner of Turkey, the Aegean Island (inc. Greece), and into the Balkans.

Virtually all of the material in commerce, which comes from the Turkish populations, are the red spathe/purple spadix form. Once you move to Crete, the inflorescences take on a different color theme with blends of white in spathe, and spadices which range from black to yellow. Below are a few which flowered at JLBG this spring.

We inherited the work of the late aroid researcher Alan Galloway, who actively hybridized dracunculus in an attempt to study the genetics as well as create new color forms for gardeners. Once final selections are made, these will require tissue culture for reproduction. Without tissue culture (dividing plants with a tiny knife), commercial quantities could never be obtained. Wish us luck!

Dracunculus vulgaris typical purple form
Dracunculus vulgaris ‘Phallic Blush’
Dracunculus vulgaris ‘White Rhino’

Canary Treasure

This is our first flowering of Dracunculus canariensis, the rare cousin of the more commonly-grown aroid Dracunculus vulgaris. Dracunculus canariensis hails from Madeira (reportedly extinct) and the nearby Canary Islands, all off the coast of Morocco.

We inherited our specimen from the late plantsman, Alan Galloway, who planned to cross it with Dracunculus vulgaris. The task now falls to us. Both species have a similiar chromosome count of 2N=28, so this should be a easy cross by saving pollen. To us, the flower smells like watermelon rhine, which is a nice change from the more offensive smell of its sibling.

Supersize & Vulgar

Just flowering at JLBG is our largest clone of the hardy aroid, Dracunculus vulgaris, that we named ‘Supersize’. This one produced a massive 30″ inflorescence. A typical length is 15-20″. We’d be curious is anyone has grown one any larger. As you can imagine, it was quite a feast for the pollinating flies.

Dracunculus vulgaris ‘Supersize’
Dracunculus vulgaris ‘Supersize’
Dracunculus vulgaris ‘Supersize’

Dazzling vulgarities

Flowering in the garden now are the amazing and very rare white-flowered Dracunculus vulgaris. This wild and crazy aroid, which typically has a red/purple inflorescence, hails from the Mediterranean region, centered around Greece and Turkey. The late aroid guru Alan Galloway worked extensively to breed these, and since we now hold his collections, we wanted to share the wonder of his work. It is our hope that tissue culture will be able to make these amazing color forms available one day.