Apostle of Ireland, Archbishop of Armagh St. Patrick has given his name to many things. St. Patrick’s Purgatory, for example, was where the saint had a vision of purgatory, traditionally on tiny Station Isle in Lough Derg, southeast Donegal. Then there is St. Patrick’s Cabbage. No, not the mythical shamrock nor a member of the Brassicaceae but a Saxifraga.
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S. x urbium is more commonly know to English and, hence Canadian gardeners, as ‘London Pride.’ However, no less an authority than the Royal Horticultural Society recognizes its alternative common name of St. Patrick’s Cabbage.
It is a delightful low, spreading perennial with evergreen foliage and light pink, delicate flowers on 25 centimetre wiry stems in late spring. According to experts, it is a hybrid of
S. umbrosa and S. hirsuta, distributed over western Europe. In her book Whose What? (1969), Dorothy Rose Blumberg says that while it is a native of the Iberian Peninsular, it is also found in the mountains of west and southwest Ireland.
Saxifraga is derived from two Latin words meaning to break rock and, indeed, many of these perennials are rockery plants. St. Patrick’s Cabbage is made of somewhat sterner stuff. A slowly spreading, trouble-free groundcover or edging plant for shady locations, asking only average to moist soil, there appears to be some argument of just how hardy the plant is, at least here in Canada.
Ottawa plantsman A. R. Buckley considered it “a good perennial in milder parts of British Columbia.” Patrick Lima of ‘Larkwhistle’ fame on Ontario’s rocky Bruce Peninsular has grown it successfully for years, which agrees with Heritage Perennial’s classification of zones 4 to 9. Hang on there, though,
Saxifraga x urbium also grows happily in Edmonton’s Devonian Botanical Garden, zone 3a.
Perhaps due to anti-Hibernian influences, it is always known here as London Pride rather than acknowledging any Irish influence. Even stranger, it is not easy to find despite, as Patrick Lima points out, being commonplace in England. Why not, he queries. And he is right: by whatever name this is a perennial that deserves wider distribution.
