Monday, June 9, 2008

Guest blog entry: the beautiful Columbine




Keeping a garden sometimes takes more than one person...and sometimes so does keeping a blog! At the Campesino's request, I'll guest-blog on plants and food occasionally. The Campesino does most of the cultivation, but usually I'm the one who cooks things from the garden, and some of the plants we grow are because I chose the variety.

So, for my first contribution I'll extoll the virtues of a beautiful specimen from our garden, the Columbine (Aquilegia spp.), probably my favorite of the flowers we grow - it's fairly hardy, very unique looking, and comes in essentially all the colors of the rainbow. This State flower of Colorado has varieties native to many different parts of the northern hemisphere, including California. We have both the California native Columbine (A. formosa) and the European variety (A. vulgaris, shown here). Our Columbines started flowering by early March this year, but by now, the beginning June, the first set of blossoms are almost all spent. I dead-headed the plants this weekend and collected the seeds, and they may flower a second time this year by August or September. The flowers produce an amazing amount of seeds in five tubes of seeds per flower - like double-rowed pea pods. They look a little like star-anise pods, but the seeds are glossy black and tiny - around the size of the head of a plain, metal straight-pin (not the plastic-ended type). I took one flower apart to see how many seeds there were per flower - it had 112!! No wonder they survived as a wildflower in so many places.

In any case, they are a beautiful and easy-to-grow flower. We started all the European Columbines from seed, and in their 3rd year in the ground they're 10" tall, 18" wide hemispheres of leafy green with 2' flower spires. In our mild winter they die back to the ground but are only bare for a month or so before sending out new, somewhat maple-shaped leaves. The flower stalks are quite stiff - like wire or bamboo skewers - so even in the wild winds we've had this spring, where branches break and other wiftier flowers flop flat, these flowers never drooped a bit. They're best left outside - various parts of the plant are poisonous and they don't last too long as cut flowers - but when the plant is in full flower they're beautiful and last quite a while. In full bloom they remind me of a Roman Candle - my kind of fireworks: silent, don't reek of gunpowder, and bloom when it's not 100 degrees outside!

Anyway, blah blah blah, boring scientific post...grow something pretty! (Just don't eat this one.)

- a Campesino's wife

1 comment:

bianca said...

I love the guest blogger post! I hope we get to read more. We told our earth-friendly cousin from Philly about your blog, and she likes to read it, too.