Description
Old Leedsii
3W-YWY
[Leedsii 4b]
(Unknown origin (British or Dutch?), pre-1905)
My workaday name for this utterly delightful, very old cultivar is “Early Olaf”, as the cup is similar to a smaller version of the over-enthusiastically pleated corona of ‘Saint Olaf’. Even the colouring suggests shared ancestry: in a young flower the base of the short, flared bowl; the minute crenulations of the irregularly ruffled margin; and some of the pleats linking the two – all are sulphury yellow tinged with a soft glimmer of faint Naples yellow/amber. In profile, the milk-white cup is folded like a concertina or fan; face on it can be a crumpled muddle of overlapping pleats. At maturity the corona expands to a rounded, shallow bowl; the close pleats dissolve into rounded ridges and furrows, creating a rim of six obscure, overlapping lobes, and the colouring softens to palest sulphur. The clear white, barely overlapping, spreading perianth segments vary in shape, from oblong or elliptic to broadly or narrowly ovate; at maturity they are a mixture of paddles and propellors, the margins reflexing, incurving and twisting. Of average height; flowering late mid-season. This came from a collection known to have been planted by 1913, but looks older.
