Sabatia dodecandra var. kennedyana
Plymouth Rose-Gentian
- Type
- Perennial
- Hardiness
- USDA Zones 6–8
- Sun
- Full Sun
- Soil
- Moist, Wet, Sandy
- Mature size
- Height 1–2 Feet · Spread 1–2 Feet
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Seasonality
- Dies back, depends on zone
This variety is no actively in production in our propagation house and may not return to our catalogue. We maintain this page purely for reference and archival purposes. If you would like to grow this plant, tell us. Your interest helps guide what we bring back.
For a larger installation or commercial project, write hello@woodlanders.net.
Sabatia dodecandra var. kennedyana, the Plymouth rose-gentian, is a globally rare perennial wildflower of the gentian family, treasured for large, starry, rose-pink flowers carried on slender stalks above a low basal rosette. Each bloom opens flat to nine, ten, or eleven clear pink petals around a yellow eye ringed in red, a jewel-like design more often expected of a cultivated exotic than a native pondshore plant. The genus name honors Liberato Sabbati, an eighteenth-century Italian botanist, while the epithet kennedyana remembers the botanist George Golding Kennedy, whose name the older common name, Kennedy's marsh pink, carries still.
In the wild the Plymouth rose-gentian lives a precarious life on the sandy and peaty shores of coastal-plain ponds, in a strikingly broken range that skips from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts and Rhode Island, then reappears far south in Virginia and the Carolinas. The plant rises from a basal rosette on stems reaching one to two feet, flowering through summer as the pond margins warm. Drainage, pollution, and the disturbance of those fragile shorelines have made the species a plant of real conservation concern, so growing the rose-gentian well is a small act of stewardship.
For the gardener the rose-gentian is a specialist's delight for the sunny edge of a pond, a bog garden, a rain garden, or any consistently wet, sandy spot that never dries out. Site the plant where the pink flowers can be seen at close range against still water, and pair with other pondshore natives that share a love of wet feet. This is not a plant for an ordinary border; the reward comes to the gardener who can offer the damp, open ground the species demands.
Give constant moisture, full sun, and a lean, sandy, acidic soil, and the Plymouth rose-gentian will settle into a slowly spreading colony that flowers more freely each year. The plant dies back to the rosette in winter and returns in spring, a quiet perennial rhythm broken each summer by one of the loveliest flowers the American coastal plain has to offer.
Large, starry, rose-pink flowers with a yellow eye ringed in red, 9 to 11 petals, on slender stalks above a basal rosette, in summer.