It begins in 1936, when a fellow named Rex Pearce (used to own a nursery name of Pearce Seed) got a hold of a bunch of Belamcanda flabellata plants from Japan. These plants had clear yellow to gold blooms. He crossed them with Belamcanda chinensis, and came up with a selection he named the Avalon Hybrids. I get the idea that these plants were various colors, and definitely had reds, oranges, and yellows in the mix.
As luck would have it, a while later the two species of Belamcanda he’d crossed were found to be just one, so the Avalon Hybrids were really intRAspecific rather than intERspecific. (That part’s for you, Tamsin! Only us plant nerds could care about the distinction!)
Meanwhile, Carl Hansen went on one of his plant-hunting expeditions and brought back, from “the wilds of Siberia” (matter of fact, I think it was near the town of Shilka, but I guess that doesn’t sound as dramatic), Pardanthopsis dichotoma, the so-called Orchid Lily, which Zilke Brothers Nursery in Michigan marketed under the name Hansen’s New Everblooming Orchid Iris. Now there’s a name to sell some plants!
In the 1960s, a plant fellow named Samuel N. Norris out of Owensboro, Kentucky, comes along and buys seed of the Avalon Hybrids from Park Seed and nursery plants of Hansen’s New etc. from Zilke Bros, and starts crossing them. I understand that the Hansen’s plants — the Pardanthopsis — were a reddish-purple bloom and the Avalons — the Belamcanda — were yellow, orange, and red, so he got himself a good rainbow effect going. In 1967 he harvested about 500 seeds from these crosses, and the original F1 (that means the first cross, Kay, if you haven’t fallen asleep yet with my rambling on!) hybrids were very uniform as to color and height. But the second generation (F2) hybrids began to show a much wider range of color and size.
Hartlage Wine Raulston Allspice (x Sinocalycalycanthus raulstonii)
Nonetheless, in the spring of 1970 Norris sent what he’d got of the new crosses to Dr. Lee W. Lenz out at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens in Claremont, California. Lenz thought they were terrific, and went ahead and got the new plants named and registered as x Pardancanda norrisii in July of 1972. (The “x” comes first to show an intergenetic cross, like our x Sinocalycalycanthus.)
Now here’s where Park’s own Doc Alston came in. He was a young firecracker out of Texas in the 1970s when he came to Park, and he continued Norris’s work. He found that the fourth generation (F4) crosses varied greatly in color and patterning as well as height, and he created a mix that included as wide a range as he could possibly get. This is the mix that Park’s been selling for some 30 years now, and a fine one it is. These plants are drought-tolerant, the blooms really are spectacular, and you never know what you’re going to get in terms of color. Most folks like the seedpods that follow the flowers best of all — they make good everlastings — but I like those orchid-like blooms about as well as anything in my garden.
And there you have it: the forebears of this new Sangria everyone’s talking about!