One of our personal favorite genera is the Southeast US native swamp gentian, Sabatia. Blooming in the garden now is Sabatia kennedeyana….no relation to the current Presidential candidate. Swamp gentian is quite vulnerable with a rarity rank of G3. It has a very limited range, naturally occurring only in sandy/peaty coastal plain habitats in an odd, disjunct distribution that includes Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and a small area on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. We’ve always listed this as a Zone 7b-10 plant, but with populations in Nova Scotia, there is obviously much more hardiness than we realized. Below are two recent images from the garden, where we grow it with sarracenias. As you can see in the photos below, the flower color from seedling to seedling varies from dark to light pink. In the right conditions, we find it incredibly growable, and am fascinated why sales were so poor, every time Plant Delights offered it.
This is one of many plants I would love to have but am afraid I would kill through not having the right environment, and I can’t afford to try them all if there’s a good chance I might lose them. Many of your plant listings mention that although a plant in the wild might be restricted to a very specific environment you have found that they will grow well in a regular garden, and this information has been helpful to me. If you added a little more cultivation advice to the listings for those plants that don’t sell well, I might be encouraged to take the risk of purchasing them.
Great point. In this case, we find sabatia to grow best in straight peat moss or in a 50/50 sand/peat mix that’s kept slightly moist.
Tony, you are providing fantastic service. One of the blogs that I have followed is https://www.greatplantpicks.org/. I do not want to add to your chores, but you have the makings of an excellent sister compliment to this reference site for the SE. Let’s make NCSU the go-to for horticulture, as Cornell is for ornithology. Go Wolfpack.
I loved coming across sabatia at my Oxford home, usually in patches of sunlight on trails through the woods. I don’t know the species, and it didn’t appear in the same place each year, which made seeing it especially delightful. To have a reliable clump, such as the featured S. kennedeyana, would add a lot of pleasure to the garden.
Perhaps you were seeing on of the many annual species, which indeed an move around. Our focus has been on the perennial species that stay in one place.