GARDENING: IN AWE OF AURICULAS

Discovered by Huguenot weavers, auriculas are now feted by florists and have spawned an exciting social circuit. Mary Keen's summer diary explains all

HOW DO YOU answer when someone asks: "What is your favourite flower?" Lots of people put roses top, but I wouldn't change my life for roses. I wouldn't go out and look at them three times a day, or drive for two hours on the off chance of acquiring new varieties. I wouldn't spend a Saturday in Birmingham for the sake of roses. For auriculas though, anything is possible. I never knew I had a favourite flower until I started to grow them. Think tidy, think bright, think clusters of primroses on stalks - not polyanthus, where the colours splurge and merge - but the elegant, arranged auricula which comes in every shade and in combinations of two, three and sometimes four distinct bands of colour, so that they look as though someone had carefully painted grey edges round green petals, with whitest centres and perhaps a hint of gold at the heart. Velvet dark reds, tawny orange gold and brown, two-tone lilac, glittering yellow, greens, greys, blues, blacks - I love them all.

I keep the subjects of my obsession in what must once have been a privy, and then became a coal hole. Now it has a glass roof and tiers of slatted shelves where 110 plants in small clay Long Tom pots stand with their leaves almost touching. All winter they sit in this cupboard, the door and windows can stay open on the coldest days, but on auriculas no winter rain must fall. These are alpines which do not need heat, but like to be kept dry and airy. Huguenot weavers are always credited with popularising auriculas at the end of the 17th century, although they were grown here earlier than that. Because the weavers worked at home they could keep a close eye on their plants, covering them when it rained and shading them from bright sun. They suit 20th-century home workers just as well as they did 17th-century ones. Instead of popping into the kitchen for a coffee, I nip outside to see how the auriculas are doing. Pick off the odd dead leaf, water a dry pot (very carefully) turn a flower to face the sun and then go back to work.

Auriculas were a focus for social life at regular florists' feasts where new varieties were compared and competitions staged. In Birmingham recently they were still the centre of attention at the National Auricula and Primula Society's annual show. Thirty classes were there, and before which, people were preparing their flowers with tweezers and cottonwool buds and tiny props and invisible twine. No mould on the pots, no blemish on blooms or leaves, and all the flowers symmetrically arranged with petal overlapping petal. I got home and examined my unshowable brood and spent the evening reading the definitive work on growing for exhibition. Auriculas by Gwen Baker and Peter Ward (Batsford) tells you everything about growing these neatest of plants to the highest standards of all.

One of the things I used to worry about when I started to make my collection was vine weevil. Vine weevil like auriculas nearly as much as I do. "One hears many stories of plant losses due to the depredations of the grubs," says the book. Nell down the road, who also loves auriculas, lost most of hers to the gardeners' worst foe. We both tried biological control, but with little success, perhaps because we left it too late to apply the mixture. The temperature needs to be right and too much rain, which there was last autumn, did not help either. But now a new compost from Levington called Intercept, with a built in vine-weevil control, may provide the help we need. Commercial growers have been allowed to use this for years, but it has only now become available to amateurs. This summer when every single auricula gets repotted and the offsets are removed from the parent plant, half will go into Intercept and the rest will have to take their chance. Green it may not be, but when The Collection is at risk, principles must sometimes be compromised. The 'Unique' Pelargoniums which move into the auriculas' quarters for the summer may get the same treatment to see if it will control the whitefly which always plagues them.

If 1998 has been the year of the auricula, tulips have had a thin time. I made some rotten choices in a hurry and a fit of meanness last autumn. "Lily flowered mixture" turned out to be cheap, but not truly mixed. Yellow and pillar box red are the dominant colours. A horrible tulip called 'Aladdin' (scarlet edged with yellow) combined with 'West Point' (all yellow), which I usually like, are not what I had envisaged. Pink, red and purple, with the odd yellow or white was what I thought I would see. So no more cut-price mixtures. No more doubles either. 'Orange Nassau' I never want to grow again, but it seemed worth a try in September. The early scented 'General de Wet', which we always grow, looks lovelier than ever this year, with 'Abu Hassan' , a sort of mahogany brown, but the picture is spoilt by 'Orange Nassau'. In the summer garden, another fearsome double which I know I never ordered, has had to be live-headed and brought in to flower on the kitchen table. Because of the wet weather and lavish helpings of manure, most of the tulips in the summer garden have got a virus, so each bulb must be removed and perhaps next year this area may have to be a tulip-free zone.

One of the advantages of opening the garden to the public is that many of the visitors are knowledeable and generous. Ask how long it takes to rid the ground of tulip fire and someone is bound to know. Give them a a trowelful of hellebore seedlings and by the next post three rare snowdrops will arrive. A pair of regular visitors wrote to me a couple of years ago saying: "I see you like primulas, would you like the following named forms? We also grow auriculas." At that stage I was struggling with no winter cover for mine, but they gave me several offsets and some good advice. "Any problems, grow them in sand." This March a very old lady noticed the clay pots and sent a letter to say she had hundreds which were now too heavy for her to use and that she would like to give them to me. I went to collect them in exchange for a tray of Cyclamen coum seedlings and plastic pots. At the start of another season of garden visitors. I look forward to exchanging ideas and plants with all sorts of gardeners. It is an exciting prospect.