Ring Them Bells (Benbow-Bouman, 2017)
Ring Them Bells (Benbow-Bouman, 2017) Passing By X (South Seas x Rose Fireglow)
Tetraploid 5”, 36”, Dormant, Early Midseason, 5 branches, 36 buds, pollen fertile. My friend, Bob Benbow liked to use my seedlings in his hybridizing program. One of his favorite parents was Wild's Passing By. Bob saw the merits of a superb plant with a scape to go with it, and he was able to take different colors to Passing By with great success.
I have admired this reddish coral result of Bob's work in my garden for six years. Bob has moved to Arkansas and built himself a new house, and he gave me permission to give this wonderful cultivar an official name. It belongs in a mixed perennial setting, when the masses of bright flowers will anchor some distant spot in the garden. There are no pattern features to require up-close viewing or confuse the overall impact of a mixed garden. This is all about color, and I recommend you divide it into a mass planting after a couple of years, because it is all about the impact of color. I gave it the name of a Bob Dylan song I play at home. I think of all these colorful flowers as bells ringing.
The song makes reference to lilies in its final stanza, and to the need to keep up the battle against evil:
"Ring them Bells St. Catherine from the top of the room,
Ring them bells from the fortress for the lilies that bloom
Oh the lines are long and the fighting is strong
And they're breaking down the distance between right and wrong."
