All about the pretty spring flower muscari, according to the owner of their National Collection
When Richard Hobbs first saw the Muscari collection he would eventually inherit in the early 1990s, it was in the hands of formidable plantswoman Jenny Robinson. She lived in Boxted, Suffolk, and was also the executor of Cedric Morris’s plants at his garden Benton End. ‘I rang her one day and asked if I could see the Muscari. I don’t think anyone had really done that before,’ Richard says. Over time, they became friends and, on one visit, he arrived to find a big pile of boxes and pots outside her house. They held the National Collection of Muscari: ‘You didn’t say no to Jenny. I was excited – it felt an honour to be asked,’ he adds.
As Richard became more familiar with the collection, he realised there were gaps so, gradually, he has added to it. Now, he has just under 200 different types across his front and back gardens (among 1,500 bulbous plants) and in the greenhouse of the house that he shares with his wife Sally Ward in Little Plumstead in Norfolk. More flourish in a nearby allotment. ‘It’s not exactly out of hand,’ he says. ‘But it’s grown a lot.’
Richard’s obsession with gardening started at an early age, both in the two acres around his family home in Durham and at school. He later studied botany, before moving to Norfolk in 1979 and working in nature conservation. But he was always particularly interested in spring bulbs and early flowering plants. Muscari hold a special fascination for him, which he attributes somewhat to the challenge of telling them apart: ‘They’re hard to identify and the differences between them are quite small. actually like that.’ Yet the most familiar (and sometimes thuggish) species have given gardeners a poor impression. The 17th-century herbalist John Parkinson advised that the plant ‘will quickly choke a ground for which cause most men do cast it into some bye corner’. Richard says, ‘Gardeners are really bad, I think, at throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And you shouldn’t do that, because the majority are wonderful little things and are never an issue.’
There are between 60 and 70 species of grape hyacinth in the wild, and far more variety in form and flowering time than people imagine. There is a wide choice of colours, too, from yellow, pink and white through to more typical blues. Most of the latter comes courtesy of Muscari armeniacum, which provide a river of blue at Keukenhof gardens in the Netherlands; ‘Benton End’ has similarly intense blue flowers, each delicately laced with a white line, while ‘Blue Spike’ has a more lavender hue. The closely related genus Bellevalia, originating from southern Europe and the Middle East, is very similar to Muscari and can be hard to distinguish from them. They come in whites and soft blues, often with shades of brown, and have shiny seeds and wide-open flowers. muscari tend to be blue, have rough seeds and their flowers are almost closed at the mouth.
While muscari is sometimes overlooked in the UK, forced grape hyacinths are big business in Belgium, Germany and especially the Netherlands, where they are grown on a vast scale. As new cultivars appear, old ones eventually disappear from the market. ‘It’s up to us to keep them going,’ says Richard. Most of his new additions are from Dutch breeders; others come from wild seed collected abroad that eventually filters through to specialists; the rest are from seedlings that turn up in people’s gardens.
