Hairy alpenrose

About the plant

Conrad Loddiges and his sons ran the greatest nursery in England at Hackney, with the largest hothouse in the world and a catalogue that stretched to two thousand plants, and from 1817 to 1833 they published their own magazine to sell them: the Botanical Cabinet, two thousand small plates in twenty volumes, drawn and engraved by George Cooke and coloured by hand, each with a page of plain advice on where the plant came from and how to grow it. It was the first gardening magazine aimed at the ordinary buyer rather than the botanist, and this plate from 1820 shows one of its hardy shrubs.

Rhododendron hirsutum is the alpenrose of the limestone Alps, a dense evergreen shrub to the knee, its leaves edged with bristles, covered in June with small rosy-pink bells. It was the first rhododendron that Europeans grew in a garden, brought to England in 1656 from the Alps, and for a century it and its sister the rusty alpenrose were the only two anyone knew, before the great Asiatic species began to arrive. The two divide the Alps between them, this one on limestone and the other on granite, and where the rocks meet they hybridise. It is a plant for the rock garden rather than the shrubbery, and Loddiges sold it as such.