Habitat: partial shade, damp
Soil: with grit and humus
Height: 20 cm
Flowering: summer
Width: 15 cm
Primula capitata and glomerata are related, and have quite tight tufts of leaves, grey-green with their covering of farina. The deep purple heads of flowers form spheres or partial spheres at the tops of the slender stems, contrasting with the dense white farina that covers all other parts of the inflorescence.
Primula glomerata SDR3924 was an eye-opener to us. Everything else we had seen masquerading as Primula glomerata has almost certainly been a form of P. capitata. As we saw this in Sikkim, it had much large individual flowers, in a much larger, hemispherical head, and with the head of flowers very obviously tilted to face horizontally. Much better!
| Primula capitata CC3843 is a collection from Nepal of this species, with dense, round heads of deep purple flowers. | |
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| Primula capitata CC6207 is one of many collections of this species made by Chris Chadwell's team in Nepal. It has typical purple flowers, deep purple, but not as dark as the extreme seen in at least one of his collections. | |
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| Primula capitata CC6536B is a collection from Nepal, originally labelled just as being in the Capitatae section, but it clearly is one of the sub-species of Primula capitata, so it will have heads of tightly packed, rich purple flowers, contrasting with the farina on the calyx. | |
| Primula capitata CC6542 has hemispherical heads of densely packed deep purple flowers, standing about neat rosettes of foliage. This is a Chadwell collection from Nepal. | |
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| Primula capitata subsp. mooreana has particularly deep purple flowers, contrasting well with the pale, farina-covered leaves. | |
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| Primula capitata subsp. sphaerocephala SDR1681 is a form with globular heads of flowers, which comes from an area centred in NW Yunnan, close to the Tibetan border. | |
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| Primula capitata subsp. sphaerocephala SDR3225 came from a grassy opening in a forest, at 3700 m. This sub-species lacks meal on the leaves, and has almost spherical heads of flowers. | |
| Primula glomerata has dense, round heads of deep purple flowers, but in this species they are large, and consistently hang to one side. |