Be of good cheer! The Drabas are here! Starting here at home:
Draba1; seed collected on one of the more "spare" boulders in a Bighorn Mountain meadow in 2009. It is always tiny and has needle-like leaves. Seed was sown on one of my "scattertroughs!" -no bother about actually trying to grow it which doesn't always work anyway.
Draba2; I believe came from Beartooth Pass many years ago. I can't say for sure how it got at the base of my front spruce -I never put a plant there -but it is really happy where it put itself. I've put seed on NARGS as D. oligosperma.
Draba3 is from a SPARQ/QARGS friend who states simply something to the effect of "nice small draba". I agree. The best of the seedlings has needle-like leaves. I'da thought these D. hispanica but Drabas are quite confusing. It does appear to be an azoides type. I've had a similar plant in a wall for years.
Draba4 is a favorite because it does one of the things that probably led me into rock gardening in the first place; big sheets of color! Draba sibirica (this may have come from Woodland Rockery) has a profound and delightful effect on the early spring garden -nothing small about it in April. Don't put them together but do plant 'Woodstock' hyacinth somewhere within eyeshot.
Draba5; not all Drabas are yellow. Draba x salomanii as sold by Woodland Rockery (long defunct) has persisted. It is compact and small. I've never seen a seed on it. There are others here: D.bryoides is putting on its little show just now. There's even a fuzzy I, unbeknownst at the time, bought as Androsace tapete. Such magnificent little things are'nt they?[tt][tt][/tt][/tt]
Edited by moderator: divided into paragraphs for readability.
