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Kirengeshoma palmata
13 September 2010
A woodland flower that waits until September is unusual. But everything about Kirengeshoma is slow-motion. It has taken the clump with these flowers twenty years to build up to its present size, on the brink of a pond that never dries out. Its mahogany-dark stems are now five feet long; weighed down by its clusters of heavy waxy flowers they sway out over the water, slowly fattening and opening from the shape you see to open bells of pointed petals with an almost crystalline sheen.
I first encountered them in a beautiful drawing by Graham Stuart Thomas (Plate 13 of his Perennial Garden Plants); a better representation than my slightly dim photo. I should really get into the water for a better angle.
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