PART TWO : GOING BACK IN TIME
Victorian Lady may (or may not - see Part 1) be the only double abutilon in cultivation today, but it’s certainly not the first of its kind.
Now, the gardeners of the Victorian era were well known both for their enthusiasm for exotic plants, among which we can count the abutilon, and for their love of a novelty. What better then in the way of exotic novelty than a double abutilon? In the American periodical The Gardener’s Monthly of July 1878 we have a reference to Abutilon Geo. A Stanley, described as ‘a great novelty… We have but one Double Abutilon that we know of under the above name…. The color, a rosy crimson, is in itself a great novelty.’ That is, however, the only mention of this cultivar that we can find, so it doesn’t seem to have caught the imagination of the horticultural trade at the time. Then, three years later, in the same publication we find the following notes in the April and December editions:
Two years after that, in 1883, the editor of the magazine reported that ‘Nanz & Neuner send us a double white abutilon. Just what ornamental value this double abutilon will have we could not decide from the specimen before us.’ Rather faint praise, and the double white abutilon appears to have sunk without trace, as it doesn’t seem to be referred to anywhere else and fails to feature in Nanz & Neuner catalogues of the time.
So reports of double abutilons were cropping up but nothing of real substance until in December 1883 the Gardener’s Chronicle, published in London, shared the following news:
And, true to their word, in their catalogue of the following year, 1884, Henderson & Co presented Abutilon Thompsoni Plena to the waiting world:
And so the gardening community finally had its first, or at least its first widely available, double abutilon. The originator of this new plant, Alexander Kennedy, writing some 15 years after the event, described how he came across it as a sport of Thompsonii when working as gardener to John T Johnson in Plainfield, New Jersey: ‘In the winter of 1882 I noticed some of the flowers on a shoot near the top that looked different from the others. I watched them closely and came to the conclusion after a while that I had found a double abutilon: all the other shoots on the plant bore single flowers. I sent specimens of the flowers to the late Peter Henderson ….. after some negotiations he bought all the stock I had propagated, and now I suppose it is to be found all over the world. Although a “sport” pure and simple, it has never reverted to the original type.’
Illustration from Revue de l'Horticulture Belge 1885
The new introduction seems, initially at least, to have been generally well received. The Gardeners’ Chronicle for January 1885, for example, opined that ‘The flowers will surely be welcomed by lovers of double flowers and florists, while those that are not usually enamoured of such flowers will not fail to recognise the merits of the present plant.’ But not everyone was in agreement. The editor of the Philadephia-based Ladies’ Home Journal, in response to a reader’s query, was very sniffy about it, saying in April 1886 ‘The double abutilon is not a very desirable plant, no matter what those may say about it who have it for sale. It is not as pretty as those having single flowers, and the variegation is exactly like that of A. Thompsonii. Do not get the idea that doubling a flower is always an improvement.’
Oh dear. Perhaps it was this failure to gain universal approval that led to the eventual disappearance of Abutilon Thompsoni Plena from general cultivation. The last reference we have seen is its being advertised in the August 1917 edition of Park’s Floral Magazine (Pennsylvania, USA). The rest is, as they say, silence.
Whatever the reason, Thompsoni Plena seems now to be no more than a historical curiosity. However, ….. which takes us to Part 3, in which we take a trip to Hawaii.
RTC December 2024