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Variegated Species—Peculiar Plants and the People Who Love Them
Plants & Gardens News Volume 15, Number 2 | Summer 2000
by Niall Dunne
In 1998, Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, North Carolina, dedicated its sales catalog to variegated plants. Tony Avent, who writes the catalog's unorthodox editorials, immediately conceded that these uniquely patterned curiosities are not everyone's cup of tea. "But for those who indulge," he said, "variegated plants add a welcome bit of insanity to any garden."
If your garden has been looking a little square lately, perhaps you should consider planting some variegated-leaf cultivars of Rohdea japonica (sacred lily). In Tony's opinion, these evergreen "hosta lookalikes" are the royal family of variegated plants. He lists a number of highly prized specimens in his catalog, including R. japonica 'Yattazu Yan Jaku', whose glossy green leaves are seductively "splashed with blotches of creamy white, as though you stuck a green Rohdea in a spinart machine."
More or less everything in the 1998 Plant Delights catalog is still available this year. And that includes my favorite plant on the list: Canna 'Phaison', a sport of the popular Canna 'Wyoming' (a sport is a mutant shoot on a plant, and a common source of new cultivars). It is purple, with dramatic stripes of yellow and red evenly spaced throughout the leaf. In the summer, shocking orange flowers sit atop its seven-foot-tall stems. A real beast! Tony aptly calls Canna 'Phaison' the "Howard Stern of the plant world."
There must be some kind of karmic link between North Carolinians and variegation. Two other devotees of variegation hail from the Tobacco State: Steve and Vickie Hass, who own the Shade Tree Nursery in Statesville. Theirs is a small nursery, doing its best to survive in an industry that's become—like most these days—increasingly consolidated and homogenized. But Steve and Vickie have a singular passion that makes them stand out in the crowd: they're crazy about variegated plants.
Steve and Vickie started the Shade Tree Nursery in 1972. In the last three decades they've collected rare variegated trees and shrubs from all over the United States, Canada, and Europe. Steve sent me a plant list of over 600 variegated species, including 37 different types of variegated holly and 58 kinds of variegated maple—and that doesn't count the many variegated herbaceous perennials the nursery grows.
For years, the dynamic duo has also bred—and christened—many new varieties themselves. These include Cercis canadensis 'Hasselea Aureovariegata Nana', a very dwarf form of eastern redbud with leaves that are a complicated patchwork of green and yellow, as well as Mahonia aquifolium 'Hassus Aureovariegatus', an Oregon grapeholly whose leaves are splashed yellow in the center and have blue-green margins.
Steve and Vickie have named their variegated product line "Peculiar Paradise Plants." This includes cuttings and scions (for grafting) of many very rare specimens. This season, they are recommending Cryptomeria japonica 'Sekkan Sugi', a heavily variegated Japanese cedar bearing needles of dark green to bright yellow, available in one- to five-gallon containers.
Pigmentally Challenged
Variegated plants don't quite fit Keats' romantic vision in "Ode to a Nightingale" of a "melodious plot of beechen green." Indeed, for some gardeners, variegated plants are garish anomalies better suited to star in an episode of "The Twilight Zone" than in any part of the yard.
So what exactly is this weird plant phenomenon? Well, variegation is generally defined as the presence of two or more colors in leaves, flowers, or stems. (This covers a lot of territory, so when gardeners talk about variegation, they tend to limit the scope of their conversations to plant foliage.)
It can also be seen as nature's way of occasionally hobbling and humbling chlorophyll, the lord of all plant pigments. Chlorophyll, of course, is responsible for photosynthesis and for giving the foliage of most plants a uniformly green color. Random mutations of DNA resulting in imperfect or absent chloroplasts—the cellular bodies that produce and house chlorophyll—are usually what give rise to variegation. (Variegation can also occur because of mineral deficiency, viral infection, or environmental disorders.)
When chlorophyll fails to maintain its sartorial sway, the plant wardrobe is up for grabs. Variegation is most commonly associated with the colors green and white. However, if other plant pigments—especially anthocyanins (reds, purples, and blues) and carotenes (yellows and oranges)—begin to assert themselves, it's goodbye Kansas, hello Munchkin Land.
Variegation often follows the natural geometry of plant foliar tissue, producing lines, veining, splashes, and edges of symmetrical elegance, as in the white-margined holly Ilex aquifolium 'Argentea Marginata'. But it also expresses itself in masterpieces of irregularity, like the creeping Houttuynia cordata 'Chamaeleon', whose surreal smorgasbord of yellow, green, pink, red, and bronze would give Picasso pause.
Technically, variegation signals some level of interference with a plant's ability to photosynthesize food. Consequently, as a general rule, variegated plants are neither as hardy as their all-green counterparts—nor as impressive in the flower department. It's not surprising, then, that they are rarely seen in the wild—nature being pretty selective about which mutant offspring it preserves.
But the pigmentally challenged live on! They are preserved—along with other such genetic "mistakes" as hundred-petal roses—in defiance of nature's bloody tooth and claw. Gardeners simply can't resist sheltering and propagating these polychromatic, many-patterned wonders and blunders, and adding them to the horticultural palette.
Gorgeous Geeks and Freaks
We've often heard the adage that variety is the spice of life. Well, it turns out that "variegation" and "variety" share the same Latin root word, varius, meaning—big shock here—"various." It's only logical (or etymological), then, that gardeners should turn to variegation to spice up their plant life.
Variegated plants are especially useful for adding counterpoint to problematic areas of shade. "Variegations can enliven a dark background or corner and create a feeling of depth and movement, compared to the relative calm or massive two-dimensionality of all green plants," explains Susan Conder in her sumptuous book Variegated Leaves: The Encyclopedia of Patterned Foliage (Macmillan, 1993).
"By virtue of contrast," Conder continues, "variegated plants also help define adjacent, plain-leafed plants more sharply." What's more, unlike fickle flowers, which generally fade after a couple of seasons at most, variegated foliage can furnish a garden with a year-round carnival of color.
For Steve Hass of the Shade Tree Nursery, the appeal of variegation doesn't end here in the arena of simple garden aesthetics. In a horticultural world replete with cloned cultivars, he sees variegation as a way for plants to express something analogous to individuality: "There is a mathematical probability for any plant to produce variegation. The more time I spend with these plants, the more I appreciate the precision with which they're created, each according to its own."
Steve has even evolved a rudimentary cosmology of variegation. In a poem that he sent me, he depicts nature as a creation— a garden—shot through with variegated riches: "white-margined waves," "snow-kissed mountains," and dusk "giving the Earth its rim of gold."
So, if you are a closet admirer of variegated plants, take heart. If you have not dared to speak the name of your love for fear of reprisal from garden purists, be strong. Variegation's time is here. It's now safe to come forth and join all the other connoisseurs of the oddball, of the gorgeous geeks and freaks of nature—and take a trip over variegation's rainbow of color.
Nursery Sources:
144 Jehovah's Good Drive
Statesville, NC 28625
(704) 876-6440
Niall Dunne is the Associate Editor of Plants and Gardens News.
Illustration by Peggy Fussell.