Granny's bonnets

May has been rather warmer, on the whole, with some really pleasant days (and a few thunderstorms and the odd downpour, which are keeping the garden green).  The tulips are now past, with ‘Black Hero’ maintaining a bit of a last stand until a few days ago, when they were removed and binned.  Alliums are now taking over in the garden, and also aquilegias, the old-fashioned ‘granny’s bonnet’ types.

Granny's bonnets in the grass

My first aquilegia acquisition, many years ago, was one that had been supplied to the nursery as ‘Nora Barlow’ but clearly wasn’t; I liked it anyway, and bought it.  It was followed shortly after by an Aquilegia alpina, a blue-flowered species.  These two cross-pollinated, as aquilegias tend to do - they're promiscuous plants - and between them produced seedlings with colours varying from pure white (now lost, sadly), pale pink, darker pink, blue, purple and near-black.  Some are bi-colours.  They are mostly in the dogwood bed which is seriously overrun with weeds – grass, herb bennet, goosegrass, woundwort, the spreading pink geranium, the usual undesirables – but they hold their own there.  They’re a lovely range of colours, and I enjoy seeing them; they attract the bees too.

One is a rather fine two-tone pink with white edges and stamens, but very short; I hope it can be persuaded to grow a little taller!  I shall collect and sow seed from it and see what comes up.

Sometimes I cut them for vases indoors, but they’re not ideal cut flowers; they tend to drop petals and pollen messily all over the place.  Vases in the house at the moment are of the much better behaved lemon snapdragon that is flowering profusely in the greenhouse.

Yellow snapdragons