I always find it amusing when I encounter gardeners with a staunch opposition to hybrids and cultivars in their garden, despite them being unable to look in the mirror and realize that they are both a hybrid and a cultivar. The first photo below is our wild collected lungwort from Croatia, Pulmonaria officinalis. The second photo, also taken the same day, is a new pulmonaria hybrid from Hans Hansen at Walter Gardens. Both plants are flowering here now. While we like both, which would you choose for your garden? I know where we see most of the pollinators, and it’s not on the wild species.
I live in NC. I was born and raised in the deep South. My wife was born and raised in New York. I met her after she moved to NC. Therefore, I married an invasive species.
Oh how true. I hear this so often. I think planting native plants is a great idea but to say everything in your yard must be a straight native..nope. I have natives, hybrids, cultivars, and yes Asian, etc..room for all. I also live in a 200 year old oak forest which serves to support more native wildlife than I can sometimes handle🤣. I could go on with this rant but you can have a diversity of plants and it will support wildlife.
I would definitely choose the hybrid. Most so-called “natives” are actually weeds and lack the great qualities of the hybrids. Like all fads, the current craving for natives is not based on reason and logic but represents mindless following by gullible gardeners blindly endorsing a trend.
Love it, Tony❣️
Well,- one of my own, true pleasures in Gardening Life…is to be able to look at a really lovely plant in my garden,- and then realize that…THIS IS EXACTLY THE PLANT WHICH GROWS IN THIS DISTANT TIBETAN MOUNTAIN-TOP,- OR THAT DISTANT ROCKY MOUNTAIN VALLEY. And unfortunately you don’t get a similar thrill out of looking at your hybridized garden-plants,- however nice they may be !
However, for some strange reason the Big Man Upstairs have this strange idea with offering Us Gardeners… “Just this single hardy species within an, otherwise, exotic & tender plant-genus,- which, though plain…may now actually offer Us Gardeners the hope to be able to produce some hardy garden-hybrids of this, otherwise, tender & exotic plant-genus”…! And…then, sadly – or happily ? – some gardeners…”succumbs to the temptation to start to try to produce these hardy hybrids”…(!)
Anyway,- though I like the wild Lungworts when I happen to come across them in nature,- I personally haven’t done much about collecting & cultivating these lovely perennials. But then some two years back a good, Romanian historian-friend invited me to go with him & his Father, when they wanted to visit his Father’s birth-place in northernmost Romania,- and then during our car-trip, up there, when we happened to make a lunch-stop in a woodland close to a town called Ilsesti, and I was now able to study the flora of a local woodland-flora there,- – I now also happened to come across this lovely little miniature Pulmonaria, , only growing to some 6-7 cm.
And then I haven’t come across any mention of ‘Miniature Pulmonarias’ in the literature, have got to wonder if this particular Pulmonaria perhaps (…if you happen to like that sort of thing…) might be used to breed & create some ‘Small Garden-pulmonarias’,- and then just wonder if anyone ‘Out There’ might have come across similar types, too ?
Haha, the radicalized illiberal native plant community has such an overwhelming blind spot they don’t realize they are openly promoting ‘monoculture’….botanical and behavioral puns intended! Haha!
…And will there perhaps be availed tome kind of dictionary with this comment, I wonder : I’m not familiar with ‘The Latest Political Terms in the US’…and then sadly get reminded about my early youth by this…when there always seemed to be some of these humorless “priesthood marxists” present at school…”wanting to turn every single discussion into a POLITICAL discussion”. But happily we eventually managed to “laugh them away”, over here – !
Anyway,- a proper ‘Devil’s Advocate’ might have offered my view of these matters a few problems by starting to discuss such subjects as ‘Natural Hybrids’, or ‘Notho-species’, I believe.
However, only lately I have come to discover and realize that some of the problems with discussing ‘Species Versus Garden-hybrids’ among gardeners…simply derives from the problem that some gardeners turns out to be ‘SPECIES-BLIND’,- and that it seems to be very difficult to explain to them “what a species actually is”,- as many don’t really seem to care “what a species is”, when it comes to the pint. And then, of course, things start to get tricky & discussions difficult, – sadly !