can guarantee that somewhere within the past few weeks your eye has been drawn to a curtain of purple, blue or pink tumbling down a wall or clinging to a sunny slope. It is aubrieta, a plant that used to be very popular on rockeries but, like them, has fallen from favour. It is a shame. Few flowers perform with such generosity, or are so good at attracting bees.
Instead of aubrieta, we tend to rely on the winter pansy for our splash of early spring colour. But aubrieta will grow just as well in a container, and the best will flower for far longer than the pansy, up until the end of May.
Botanists previously recorded 20 species but present thinking has reduced these to 12. Their four-petalled flowers tell us that they are crucifers or members of the brassica family. There are six European species and take their name from Claude Aubriet (1688-1743), a French botanical artist. All are found on limestone, but some appear on open scree, others in crevices while some crop up in coniferous woodland.
The crevice formers are trickiest to grow at home. Pottertons Nursery (01472 851714; www.pottertons.co.uk) sells some of these alpine species, and some rare garden varieties too. 'Valerie’, newly collected from 'Denmark’, is a variegated cream and green with lilac flowers.
Most named garden forms are seedlings probably raised from A. deltoidea, a species found in the Balkan Peninsula, the Aegean and south-west Europe. It varies naturally and includes lilac and red-flowered forms, with doubles also recorded in the wild. Alpine nurseries tended to grow and select their own seedlings. These varied naturally, and also hybridised where several species grew together. The name A. x cultorum covered these hybrids, though many aubrietas are not attributed to a species at all.
