Sometimes you think you have lost a plant, and then you find it again. Five years ago I was smitten by the quiet charm of a sedge, Carex grayi. There was a plastic tray of half a dozen of them in the van that used to call weekly at the plant centre with racks of the sort of plants garden centres put in the front line of display, intended as impulse purchases. You have almost certainly seen them if you visit garden centres along the Suffolk and Essex border: I have recognised their little pots of snowdrops and dwarf iris in flower even at the Chatto gardens.
It was the manager's job to choose what to buy out of the van, and I was not always allowed to look, but sometimes I was and it was great fun, a fairy grotto of flowers, and made a welcome change from watering. I exclaimed so enthusiastically over the sedge that he took a tray. I promptly bought one, and then felt vaguely guilty as the others lingered for rather a long time in the grasses section. Evidently my taste for obscure sedges was in advance of that of the general plant buying public.
Carex grayi is a delight, in a very low key way. The leaves are mid green, rushy and typically sedge like, but the thing you buy it for is the flowers, which form spikey clusters like a little medieval mace. One of its common names is the mace sedge, though in its native United States where armed medieval warfare was not a thing they call it gray sedge, not because it is grey but because it is named after a great American botanist, Asa Gray.
Sedges tend to like it dampish and I planted my new treasure in the bog bed, which is one of the damper bits of the garden though not actually boggy unless we get a very long wet spell so that the water table rises. I no longer remember the exact spot, which tends to be the problem with planting treasures in a large and wild garden, and the sedge did not remain to remind me but disappeared, I think fairly rapidly. Perhaps it was too dry, or even too wet as the water table rose astonishingly for a while around then and turned part of the bed into knee deep mud soup. Perhaps it couldn't compete with the self seeding Thalictrum and ever expanding Persicaria. At any rate it was lost.
Then this summer a sedge appeared growing in the gap between two of the concrete slabs outside the greenhouse where the original wooden former had rotted away. I initially assumed it was seedlings of the tedious sedge I used to have growing in the formal pond until I lost patience with its rampancy and lack of charm and pulled it out, since when seedlings have been cropping up all round the paving slabs by the pond and in the pond itself. Before I could get round to weeding it up or poisoning it, however, it began to flower and I saw it was not the dull, dangly sedge of the pond but Carex grayi. Reader, I left it to get on with it, and a couple of days ago picked all the ripe seed heads and brought them indoors. Today I painstakingly pulled every dry brown mace apart and picked out several dozen fat seeds, which are now in an envelope for sowing next year, then if they come up and I get several I can try to find a place more to its liking, and maybe keep one in a pot by the conservatory as a friend for the sedge I bought at the Great Dixter plant fair.
It's true you can buy seed of Carex grayi, so I could have replaced mine before now, but I haven't. There is a limit to how many packets it feels sensible to buy, after all, when you know you have to look after all the seedlings, and Carex grayi never made it to the top of the list. But home saved seed is another thing entirely. What amazes me is how something that was planted out at the bottom of the back garden in August of 2012 managed to suddenly reappear five years later outside the greenhouse in the front garden. It would have stood on the concrete waiting to be planted, so did it seed itself then and the seeds lay dormant in the crack for five years before springing to life? After an effort like that it deserves another chance in the garden, though actually I still haven't pulled the mystery plants out of the concrete.
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