M. 'Lingholm' (Fertile Blue Group)
A fully fertile and robust but variable cultivar which is readily raised from seed. The best forms are very elegant.
MG Rating: ★★★★★   Awards: AM (2005)
Named by: M. Swift, pre-2000. Registered by: The Meconopsis Group, 2002.
Flowering: mid-May to June. Sky-blue, half-nodding to lateral facing, saucer-shaped flowers with broadly overlapping petals which are ovate and slightly fluted. There are usually two to four flowers arising on short pedicels from the false whorl on each stem but one or two other flowers may come later from the upper leaf axils.
Emerging foliage: Ascending, broadly lanceolate and slightly boat-shaped leaves on short sturdy petioles. The young leaves are densely covered with long, pale brown, white-tipped hairs giving them a furry appearance.
Mature foliage: The mature basal leaves are long-petioled, the lamina elliptic-oblong with a shortly attenuate base and a sub-acute apex. The leaf margins are irregularly and shallowly notched.
Fruit capsule: Narrowly ellipsoid and densely covered with pale straw white-tipped bristles. Long narrow style and narrow stigma. Fully fertile.
Etymology: The cultivar was given its name after Lingholm Garden, near Keswick. It is known that in the early 1960s Digby and Roger Nelson found that a plant of M. × sheldonii in their garden at Brampton had produced viable seed. The plant had originally been purchased from Inshriach Nursery, Aviemore. Plants were raised from the collected seed, and they also proved to be fully fertile. Seed was later given to Lingholm Garden and from there plants were raised and erroneously sold in large numbers to garden visitors as M. grandis. When Mike Swift took over as Head Gardener at Lingholm in 1984 he recognised that this name was incorrect and initially changed the name to M. × sheldonii ‘Lingholm strain’ and then later to M. × sheldonii ‘Lingholm’. However, both M. × sheldonii and M. ‘Slieve Donard’ (a known example of M. × sheldonii) should be sterile because of a chromosome mismatch, and it has now been established that M. ‘Lingholm’ has twice as many chromosomes as either M. × sheldonii or M. ‘Slieve Donard’. It is this chromosome doubling that has made M. ‘Lingholm’ fully fertile. The cultivar is not therefore an example of M. × sheldonii and should not be named as such. With Mike’s agreement the cultivar name was simplified to ‘Lingholm’ and this name was confirmed by The Meconopsis Group in 2000 and subsequently registered.