Genus Epimedium and Other Herbaceous Berberidaceae

This book on Epimedium, Vancouveria and other herbaceous Berberidaceae (a revised and much enlarged new edition of my monograph published in 1938) remotely owes its origins to the rock-garden enthusiast Reginald John Farrer (1880-1920), of whose many publications I published a bibliography in E.H.M. Cox's Plant Introductions of Reginald Farrer: 99-113 (November, 1930). Browsing at that time through Farrer's vividly written encyclopaedia The English Rock Garden (1919) I came across an article on Epimedium, the name then completely unknown to me. This began: 'Epimedium. The Barren-worts are all much of a muchness except in the colour of their flower-flights plants of extreme but unappreciated value for quiet shady corners of the rock-garden, where they will form wide masses in tiem, and send up in spring and early summer 10-inch showers, most graceful and lovely of flowers that suggest a flight of wee and monstrous Columbines of waxy texture, and in any colour, from white, through gold, to rose and violet. Then, beginning later than these, appear the leaves, hardly less an adornment in summer than the flowers to spring. For these are of a delicious green, much divided into pointed leaflets, and borne on airy wiry stems. Farrer's intriguing account led me to look for 'those delightful things' in Cambridge gardens and to become fascinated by them. The 'dire tangle' of names for Japanese members of the genus mentioned by Farrer seemed to exist for all the cultivated ones. Accordingly, monographing the genus Epimedium promised to be an interesting educational study and indeed proved to be such, because it led not only to elucidation of the taxonomy and nomenclature of the wold and cultivated species and forms, but also to a consideration of past climatic changes responsible for its extraordinary disjunct distribution. Photo above: Epimedium sagittatum. In the wild at Xiuning, Anhui Province, China, 980 m. Photograph: Mikinori Ogisu.Stearn, William T. is the author of 'Genus Epimedium and Other Herbaceous Berberidaceae' with ISBN 9780881925432 and ISBN 0881925438.