Super Seedlings
In general, I am not a fan of things that self-sow. I know that it is very popular to have lovely little seedlings of one beloved plant or another, and as delightful as blue love-in-a-mist (Nigella) flowers and inflated seedpods are, I’ve been weeding those annuals out for five years. There IS such a thing as too much of a good thing.
All that said, can you imagine how I felt when I tried to divide my Eryngium planum ‘Blaukappa’ and killed it? I wanted more (greedy me – I knew it was dicey, at best, to try). Although Eryngium (sea holly) can be grown with success from cuttings taken of fleshy side roots (that’s how I got my original plants), it cannot be cut through the crown without disastrous results. Coincidentally, seedlings appeared for the first time in the gravel garden. I didn’t even notice them, until last spring when the little basal growths began to expand. I doubted they would resemble the original variety, but in hopes of getting something nearly as blue, and in order to compare it to another ‘Blaukappa’ about 200 feet away, I decided to let the seedlings grow. I figured I would be discarding 25 or so of the 30-odd plants.
Flower buds appeared in June, and colored up in July, and were still in full bloom on August 7. They are a stunning, steel blue – just like their mom. I removed half of the plants, just to keep them from smothering others in the garden, and those that I left look great with a verbascum of dubious origin that also self-sows in the garden. It is most-likely Verbascum undulatum with a few other species mingled in. I get about five or six plants of this biennial every year, and leave three or four if they are in good places. Believe me, branching candelabras with canary yellow flowers look very good with vivid blue, as you can see (above), so I let this self-sown pairing have its place in the sun.
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