Peter Pan Saxifrage Plants

Peter Pan Rockfoil / Mossy Saxifrage Plants: Saxifraga. 1 Litre Pots

Part of the Mossy Saxifrage group, Peter Pan is a low evergreen perennial that spreads via offsets into a cushion of attractive light green ground cover. Profuse pink-red flowers with a pale yellow centre in April and May.

Delivery season: Saxifrage plants are delivered in pots year round, when in stock.

Features:

• Ideal for rockeries & containers
• Hardy evergreen perennial
• Pink-red flowers Apr-May
• Matt forming ground cover
• Partial shade tolerant
• Low maintenance
• RHS Award of Garden Merit
• To 15cm x 30cm

Growing Peter Pan Saxifrage

These hardy succulents prefer a bit of shade, especially in midday: in the South they are suitable for close to (but not quite) full shade, and in Scotland full sun is generally fine as long as they are sheltered. They require neutral to alkaline, sharply drained, sandy or gritty soil that is consistently moist in the growing season, so they do need watering in dry weather. Like other succulents, they cannot stand being waterlogged, especially in winter.

Trim off the flower stalks when the season is over.

Please note: If you receive your plants in late Autumn or during winter, it is better not to plant them outside until the weather warms up in Spring. They won't establish well in cold soil, and there is a small risk of them failing as a result.

In Your Garden Design

Given that the name "Peter Pan" can be interpreted to mean the bedrock of everything (see below), these plants certainly live up to their name as a "bed-rock" - literally so in rockeries. They are also fantastic patio container plants. Pair with dwarf spring bulbs such as aconites, anemones and muscari together with our mixed alpine collection of plants. Also partner with saxifraga alpino white, dianthus nyewoods cream and Oxalis 'Ione Hecker'.

Did You Know?

Saxifraga means stone breaker (Saxum + frangere), due to their preferred habitat of cracks and crevasses in rocks. It seems that Pliny the Elder, who described a plant in his Natural History called Silaus, thought that the rocks that this plant breaks are gallstones, but it is possible he was referring to something else (maybe celery), and in any case the Latin word for gallstone is calculus.

Peter Pan, the most famous inhabitant of Neverland, is known to our world through the work of Sir James Matthew Barrie (1860 - 1937), who first recorded his adventures in his 1902 book, The Little White Bird. His name is understood in two ways: one reading holds that he is named Peter after Peter Llewelyn Davies (1897 - 1960), whom Sir Barrie supported after Peter's parents died, and Pan, the wild mountain god of the Arcadian Greeks, who walks among humans and animals. The other reading of the name is derived from the Greek words petros, rock, and pan, which means everything (usually as a prefix). So, Peter Pan can mean something like "the bedrock of everything", in the sense that both civilisation and the individual are rooted in Peter's untamed, unruly, endlessly imaginative, often unreliable yet always courageous nature.