Aquilegias deserve a place in everyone’s gardens for two practical reasons. First, they flower in May when there’s a dearth of flower and, second, the spurred forms (like A. chrysantha ‘Yellow Queen’) are full of nectar. In fact it’s the spurs that give this plant the name aquilegia. Aquila is Latin for eagle and the spurs were thought to resemble an eagle’s talons. The other common name is columbine and this refers to the dove or columba in Latin. If you upend the flower, the spurs look like birds feeding from a dish. Indeed, ‘doves round a dish’ is one of the old Somerset names collected by Geoffrey Grigson in The Englishman’s Flora.
They are members of the buttercup family or the Ranunculaceae and they prefer to grow in shade where the ground is cool at their feet. Not surprising, because this family is named after Rana the frog and includes trollius, aconitum, clematis, hellebore, anemone and celandine. All are lovers of a cool soil.
The aquilegia was known as Herba leonis – the herb of the lion – in the Middle Ages. If you rubbed the leaves on your hands it was thought to give you the courage of a lion. The seeds were fed to people who had the plague and it was one of six herbs of pestilence. I don’t recommend eating the seeds, because the buttercup family are toxic and wolf bane, or aconitum, is powerful enough to kill a wolf.
Planting spurred aquilegias helps to support bees because the spurs contain lots of nectar – the sugar-rich energy drink. As a result most aquilegias cross to produce a variety of form and colour. Try to foster all blues in a border and the wishy-washy pinks inevitably ruin the show. However, there are stable seed strains which have an extremely long provenance and they will reproduce from seed almost exactly.
A. vulgaris ‘Nora Barlow’, a green and pink quilled pompom, is one of these stable strains. Although named and promoted in the 1960s by Alan Bloom, it was a 17th-century plant recorded by Parkinson. It is willowy with starry flowers and it must be used in drifts to have any impact.
Nora was the granddaughter and biographer of Charles Darwin. She gardened at The Orchard and bequeathed her land to New Hall in Cambridge. Nora, who died in 1989, carried out genetic experiments with aquilegias and collected many for this purpose. But her experiments were ruined after she showed her six children how to drink the nectar from the spurs. She lived to a great age, finally dying at 104. There are now other forms including ‘Black Barlow’.
But at the moment I am enjoying the huge lemon-yellow flowers of A. chrysantha ‘Lemon Queen’ and they are flowering underneath next door’s Copper beech. This tree is not a favourite of mine. The young leaves are bronzed and shiny, but they harden to a flat copper-red. Finding plants to flatter its leaden branches is a challenge, but the airy lemon flowers work well. A. chrysantha is an extremely long-spurred American species found growing wild in moist places from the Grand Canyon southwards to Mexico. It has proved very hardy and is said to be very long lived. I am glad, for growing aquilegia seed in a pot is a road to disaster. Far better to sprinkle any seeds straight on to the ground in late summer.
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