Jim and Jenny Archibald have been growing and distributing seeds to other specialists for 20 years. They not only know the plants in the wild but cultivate many of them in their garden in West Wales.


Jim Archibald has been growing and collecting plants and seeds for over 40 years. He spent his early youth in Scotland and from there he travelled in search of plants through North Africa and the Middle East, collaborating with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh and Kew. He also worked with Jack Drake at his famous alpine-plant nursery in the Scottish Highlands. Later over 10 years were spent with Eric Smith running 'The Plantsmen', a nursery in Dorset, England, specializing in unusual herbaceous and alpine plants. Many of the plants they introduced are now classic garden-plants.

Jim and Jenny ran the nursery in Dorset together from 1975 but decided in 1983 to spend most of their time looking for plants in the wild. Over the years they have travelled through most of southern Europe and North Africa, through Turkey and the Near East to Iran, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. They have journeyed extensively through western North America many times and in South America have travelled through the Andes of Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina. They have visited the flowers of the New Zealand mountains and the South African Drakensberg. Few people can rival the extent of their knowledge of plants in the wild and even fewer can equal their experience of growing and propagating these same plants in cultivation.

Iris barnumae f. protonyma
photographed North of Khoi, Iran

Click on the 'Genus' button to find out more about the other species in Iris Section Oncocyclus.