The anchor plant, Colletia paradoxa, with its geometric architecture, looks like trouble among the summer flowers in the herbaceous borders on the terrace gardens. And yet its very oddness makes it fit with an assembly of plants few, if any, of which would grow together in the wild. A paradox indeed.
Plants from the Americas, the far east and Europe grow cheek by jowl according to an aesthetic based on colour and form rather than geography. Although many do share similar ecological characteristics, some appear suited for other planets.
Also known as curumamil or thorn of the cross, C. paradoxa is an evergreen shrub a long way from home. It is native to dry areas of southern Brazil, Uruguay and northern Argentina.
Its leaves look like boat anchors or aeroplane propellers but are in fact cladodes, stems modified to photosynthesise, protected by an epicuticular wax and tipped with a little stiletto spine to deter grazing. It has adapted to arid soils through a relationship with actinomycetes, micro-organisms that fix atmospheric nitrogen into nutrients the plant can absorb.
Another paradox is that while it is flourishing in a mid-Wales garden, in South America it is becoming extinct because of habitat destruction.
Curumamil was collected by the 18th-century French naturalist Philibert Commerson, who named it in honour of the 17th-century botanist Philibert Collet.
Commerson was the naturalist on Louis-Antoine Bougainville’s round-the-world expedition in 1766-69. This voyage was famous, among other things, for two discoveries: the wildly vivid Bougainvillea spectabilis from Rio de Janiero and the identity of Commerson’s assistant Jean Baret, who was actually Jeanne and thus the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
This plant, thanks to a man once dismissed by an Oxford botany professor as a libertine, arrived in British gardens in 1824. Though usually described as an oddity, it is really one of those plants that make you stop and wonder. Its dangerous beauty hints at vast open plains a world away from these green hills and although it may have been stolen by European adventurers as a horticultural curiosity, perhaps it has been paradoxically rescued.
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