The easiest thing to do is make a lumpy white sauce.  The second easiest thing to do is to grow Triflora rhododendrons.  The third easiest thing to do is to ignore the Triflora rhododendrons.

The Triflora (three flowers) has been a neglected Section of the Rhododendron genus in most gardens on Vancouver Island.  The best known of the group is R. augustinii.  Still, it is not a plant that one can find in the average nursery.  A potential buyer of a rhododendron will trip over a slew of ‘Unique’ and ‘Jean Marie’ without sighting one species of the Triflora.

The Triflora Subsection of the scaly leafed rhododendrons (Lepidotes) is a large and important group that is centered in Western China.  Most get to be quite tall and, with their smaller narrow leaves, have a slender, willowy look. Many of them have flowers, not only at the end of the branches, but also in the axils of the topmost leaves, so they put on a big show when in bloom.  Interestingly, many of the Triflora have more than the basic number of chromosomes.  This is termed polyploidy.  Some have twice the normal 26 chromosomes and some three times.  Cox says this limits the amount of hybridization that can take place among those with different counts.

 The colour of augustinii ranges from white to wine.  The ‘blue’ forms of augustinii are not seen as frequently in gardens as they should be but the other shades are downright rare.  I have a clone called ‘Burgundy’ and that will bloom for me for the first time this year.  ‘Marine’ is the most popular of the augustiniis being quite deep colored, almost purple but I like the paler ones every bit as much. 

I warm to some plants in the garden in no small part because of their association with where I got the plant, or who gave it to me, or because of the plant’s history of discovery and introduction.  R. augustinii commemorates Augustine Henry.   Trained as a medical doctor, initially in his native Ireland and then at Edinburgh, he joined the Chinese Maritime Customs. After a year at Shanghai, he was sent to Ichang (Yichang) on the Yangtze as assistant medical officer where for long periods of time he was bored out of his wits. “Oh, if you knew the weariness of the exile’s life.  I have become a great collector of plants, and after exhausting the neighborhood I thought of going into the mountains, so I spent six months in two journeys into the interior.”

Probably the greatest of Henry’s legacies was the introduction of the handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata).  Henry didn’t collect plants; he preserved herbarium specimens (5000 species) and after following up the French missionary Pere David’s original discovery of the handkerchief tree, it was his specimens that stimulated the English nursery Veitch to send out Ernest Henry Wilson to bring it back to England and subsequently to North America.