Sign of the summer as the columbine blooms
Sunday May 25 2008
ONE of the trademark plants of an old-style cottage garden, the columbine has much to recommend it for any garden. It is one of those easy-to-grow plants that need little effort, but produce lots of colour.
The flower is very distinctive, with five tubes, five pointed petals just behind and five long spurs from the flower. If the tip of the spur is nipped off, sweet nectar can be sucked from the tube. Just be careful to check there is nothing else in there!
Although it is an old-fashioned flower, columbine is still popular. It often appears by roadsides as an escape from gardens. It is a native plant, but the truly wild kind is rare, found in the centre of the country in limestone meadows, usually a dark purple-blue.
The columbine, or aquilegia, which is its botanical name, is a member of the buttercup family. The cultivated plants have bigger flowers in brighter colours, having been the subject of much crossing and breeding. The long spurs at the back of the flower are exaggerated in garden forms, giving large flowers with really long tails.
There are also double-flowered forms where the tubes and spurs have become petals. The effect of these is more colourful but they are not as graceful as the natural shape. These altered kinds are often fertile and set seeds and can also back-cross with the spurred kinds.
Aquilegia can be purchased as plants in garden centres or can be easily grown from seeds. The seeds can be sown now in early summer to give plants for planting in autumn to flower next year. After that, the plant will self-sow freely, sometimes too enthusiastically, but it is never really a weedy plant.
The foliage of columbine is attractive -- it has a blue-green colour and is much divided and rounded. A rosette of leaves is formed at ground level, and in spring the flower stem can reach to well over 60cm. It has the ability to survive in rough grass, a very pretty effect.
Aquilegia looks well in borders and flower beds too. Because of its habit of self-sowing, it tends to move about and create drifts of plants or isolated specimens. The plants may not live all that long, but new plants will be coming on to replace the older ones.
Columbine flowers quite early in summer and it is brilliant for filling the colour gap that affects so many gardens at this time of year.
There is a good range of colours, mostly blue and pink, but also reds, orange and yellow, and dark wine red and purple.
