In 2015, one of our crazy plant explorer friends, mentioned that he was heading to Iran to botanize for for plants. The first thing that popped into my mind, was my long-standing quest to acquire some wild documented poet’s laurel, Danae racemosa. Surprisingly, he was able locate fruiting plants from the Mazandaran region, just north of Tehran. As a sidenote, for those, who haven’t studied world history in a while, Persia officially changed it’s name in 1935 to Iran.
The resulting seedlings from the seed we received, are now a decade old, and just starting to develop into nice garden plants. The foliage on the Iranian material is somewhat narrower than the old pass-along material, which is of unknown origin. The other interesting difference is that the Iranian collections have mostly solitary stalks that measure up to 5′ long, compared to the typical 3′ of the typically cultivated material. It appears that the cultivated material, which has been widely grown in Europe for the cut flower trade, as Italian ruscus, since the 1920s, is from genetics which form compact, well-branched, good fruiting plants. Our plants are just beginning to produce a small number of fruit, but we hope the quantities will continue to increase as the plants age.
