Hermodactylus is the strangest flower we sell, and one of the most quietly beautiful. In April it opens a single iris on each stem in colours no other spring bulb offers, standards of a soft grey green and falls of the deepest, most velvet black. It is not a showy thing. It is the plant a visitor stops at, looks at twice, and asks the name of. Gardeners have long known it as the widow iris.
What Is the Widow Iris
An iris, near enough, though the botanists keep changing their minds about it. It has been called Iris tuberosa and Hermodactylus tuberosus by turns, and you will meet it under both names. What is not in doubt is the flower, a single bloom of green and black on a stem about twenty five centimetres tall, faintly and sweetly scented if you bend to it, sombre from across the garden and intricate up close. There is nothing else like it in the April border.
Where Should You Plant It
In the hottest, driest, sunniest corner you have. It comes off the dry banks of the Mediterranean, baked through summer and sharply drained the year round, and it wants the very same from you, a gritty bed, the foot of a sunny wall, or the top of a bank where water never lies. Wet is the one thing it will not forgive. Poor thin soil suits it far better than any rich damp border could.
Spend and Save
The more you plant, the more you save. The discount applies to your whole order, and delivery is free over £100.
How Do You Plant It
About ten centimetres deep, the tubers going in through the autumn, and then a little patience. Hermodactylus often sulks its first spring and comes good in the second, settling in and increasing into a small colony once it has decided it likes the place. Give it the baking it asks for and leave it be. The grassy leaves stand well above the flower and set it off, and beyond that it wants nothing from you at all.
Why Grow It
From the fingers of Hermes, which is what the name means, after the little finger shaped tubers the plant grows from. Widow iris it became for the mourning colours of the bloom. It is a curiosity, and we mean that as the highest kind of praise, one for the collector and for anyone tired of the usual spring yellows and blues. Grow it where you pass it daily, or cut a single stem for a small vase where its oddness can be studied at close range.
Plant These With Your Hermodactylus
The widow iris asks for an open, sunny spot and the sharpest drainage you can give it. A few low, bright things planted around it flower in the same early weeks and lift its sombre colouring, and every one of these wants the very same baked, well drained ground.
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