You’re welcome, Jim! Access to strange and wonderful things come from all avenues. Jim Delahanty “discovered” Ralph’s Climbing Yellow Sweetheart on an over 50s discussion list when another poster hit on something he’d posted about being into roses. She said if he was into preservation, he should collect her Cl. Mlle. Cecile Brunner. When he responded that it wasn’t endangered, she countered with “what about YELLOW Cecile Brunner?” She had a plant of an “extinct” variety eating her garage which had been in place for fifty years! You never know what other common interests hide just beneath the surface with the other people you encounter on line. Cross post some of them and get ready for some surprises.
Have you considered writing to the two gardens on HMF who list Hulthemia in their gardens? There are three, but the first one, A Hidden Sanctuary, is an archive of everything which passed through my old garden in Newhall, which doesn’t exist anymore. Two gentlemen in the mountains above Santa Rosa, whom I met on a visit to the area in the early 90s, had Hulthemia and grafted it to Silvermoon to share with me. They were also my source for my original Minutifolia, Stellata mirifica, Stellata Stellata, Stanwell Perpetual and many others. Due to their limited well water and penchants for the “unusual”, they had collected xerophytic plants of all types and were doing quite well with them. Unfortunately, both have become very closed to anyone from “the outside”.
You might consider putting together an email introducing yourself with links to your creations and experimentation on line and asking the growers on HMF for seed or even to see if they may be able and willing to share suckers of the plants. Your credentials are certainly sufficient to prove yourself “worthy” of them taking a chance with the material!
“Challenge your assumptions”
Absolutely! This is precisely why I was not so jokingly labeled a “rose heretic” early on. Each time I was shown how to do something, different ideas about how to make it easier or less expensive in my situation came to mind. Not everything worked, but many have! No new knowledge can come from following the “rose legend” recipes. We’ve all encountered the repeated misinformation glommed onto from an earlier work. Most of it was old wives tales to begin with and hold nor more value today than it did when first printed. There was always a kernel of truth to them, but once they become “scripture” they have mostly outlived their value. I’ve encountered very little which had to followed precisely.
A few years after finally getting my imported Euphrates in the ground, we had a series of gully washer rain storms which caused a great deal of erosion, burying Euphrates under easily a foot of silt. There were other issues I had to contend with first so the plant sat mostly covered in the fine, wet silt. It didn’t rot, but every cane rooted and resulted in nearly two dozen own root plants. Minutifolia does need decent drainage, but, like Stellata mirifica, is quite happy in heavier native So Cal soil with copious layers of raw horse manure and weekly deep waterings. Both not only thrived in the wind and high heat, but quickly spread into thickets, colonies. It was only when I tried to better give them what they supposedly wanted, I experienced problems. As long as they received exactly the same water, mulch and fertilizer Silvermoon, Linda Campbell, Red Coat and the other more traditional roses around them did, they grew and scattered flowers over much of the summer. Yes, challenge everything, but don’t fix it if it ain’t broke!