Three species of small evergreen perennials from the Pyrenees, mountains of north-eastern Spain and the Balkans. They are rosetted and clump-forming with thick textured corrugated leaves and wide open, shortly tubed flowers with four to five broad petals and a small cone of yellow anthers, in open cymose panicles.
Classic rock garden plants for raised beds, rock crevices, dry walls, tufa blocks and pots in the alpine house. They appreciate a site shaded in summer but will tolerate quite sunny exposures and are remarkably drought tolerant. Most well drained soils are suitable. Propagation by division after flowering, late summer or spring, leaf cuttings in summer, and seeds in spring. The latter must be sown on the compost surface without further covering, and the seedlings are very slow-growing for the first year or so.
a, R. myconi; b, R. nathaliae; c, R. serbica;