by Kathleen S. Van Horn
I was 12 when my father took a sabbatical and brought our family to live in Colorado for a year, and it was there that I first fell in love with columbines.
The plant I saw there was Aquilegia caerulea, the Rocky Mountain columbine, appropriately Colorado's state flower. During the summer you see its long-spurred blue and white flowers and delicately divided foliage throughout the mountainous West, from New Mexico to Idaho. To my somewhat fanciful imagination, the graceful, nodding flowers looked like tiny jester's caps for a royal fairy court.
Later, during college, I spent part of one summer in England, where I greatly admired the cottage gardens I saw in and around Dorset and Cambridgeshire. A staple plant of many of these gardens was a short-spurred columbine with somewhat smaller flowers in many colors. These delicate beauties, I learned later, were varieties of the European wild columbine or granny's bonnet, A.vulgaris.
Today just the sight of columbines lifts my spirits -- this early-blooming perennial is perhaps one of the reasons I became a gardener. I've learned about the many forms of these delightful plants and that's what I'd like to share with your here.
Tall and Stately, Dwarf and Winsome
My first love was -- and still is -- Aquilegia caerulea. One of the larger columbines at 2 1/2 feet, its beautiful bicolored blossoms are long-spurred and flaring, with blue spurs and sepals and white petals. An occasional flower may be all blue.
Another tall North American native is the red and yellowEastern wild columbine, A. canadensis. It also has long spurs, but the blossom is quite narrow, an unusual shape among columbines. Like many other brightly colored, tube-shaped flowers, it is attractive to hummingbirds and butterflies.
A southwestern native is A. chrysantha. It is a 3 1/2-foot-high, golden-flowered columbine that has contributed much to modern hybrids. Texas Gold, recently introduced by Texas AM horticulturists, is a selection from plants that grow in the Big Bend region of west Texas. Valued for its heat tolerance and butter yellow flowers, it's recommended for gardeners that live in the mid- to lower South.
The western columbine is A. formosa. Usually found in the shade of sycamores or oaks, it grows throughout much of the West -- Utah to California to Alaska. Mature plants are 1 1/2 to three feet tall and bear nodding, one- to two-inch red and yellow flowers.
Winsome Aquilegia flabellata, the Japanese fan columbine, is a popular 18-inch-high dwarf type. The flowers are short-spurred and similar in shape to the granny's bonnet, but with the celestial color combination of A. caerulea, in a deeper blue. Even smaller at six to 12 inches high is A. flabellata var. pumila, also available as all-white variants, A. flabellata var. pumila 'Alba' and A. flabellata 'Nana Alba'.
Midsized A. fragrans from northern India adds a hint of fragrance to its charms. Blossoms are short-spurred and similar in appearance to the Japanese fan columbine, but with a little more flare to the sepals. The flowers are creamy white in color, sometimes tinted pink. Though long-lived, A. fragrans has been a shy of bloomer for me. Perhaps it would be more productive in a sunnier, drier site. On the other hand, a California correspondent reports it is neither long-lived, floriferous, nor particularly fragrant in her garden.
The European wild columbine, A. vulgarize, must win the prize for being available in the most varieties. For centuries it has been a well-loved and widely grown cottage garden flower. The short-spurred flowers come in many shades of pink, maroon, purple and white, but are usually not bicolored.
I find one of the double forms A. vulgarize 'Flore Pleno' (aka 'Plena'), very attractive: only the petals are doubled, the sepals and spurs retain their characteristic graceful form, as if "granny" had added a few more frills to the trimming of herbonnet. A more unusual double variety, 'Nora Barlow' is the oldest known columbine (records indicate it was known 300 years ago as the "rose columbine"). It has spurless blooms of an older type sometimes called "clemati-flowered" because they're a mass of pointed, doubled sepals. The result is a flower that more resembles a miniature dahlia than a familiar columbine. Its colors are shades of magenta, green and white. Nora Barlow and the other clematis-flowered columbines are real curiosities. To me, they lack the dainty nodding grace of most other columbines; they're more interesting than beautiful.
Hensol Harebell, a cross between A. vulgarize and A. alpina (the alpine columbine), is a rich blue-purple in color and has proved to be exceptionally long-lived in my garden. The variety 'Woodside'(A. vulgarize, Vervaeneana group) is notable for its yellow or cream variegated foliage.
Aquilegia x hybrida is the most common columbine in American gardens. This is the familiar long-spurred, large-flowered type. Originally A. x hybrida indicated crosses of A. canadensisand A. vulgarize only. But in practice this group includes bloodlines of other species such as A. caerulea, A. chrysantha and others.
Available mostly as bicolors in bright combinations of red, blue, purple, pink, white and yellow, these hybrids challenge bearded iris for the title "rainbow flower." A group of these in bloom is as colorful as a gathering of jockeys arrayed in gaily colored racing silks!
There are many named strains of these hybrids. Most are available only in mixed colors. The 'McKana' hybrids (an All-America Selection bronze medal winner in 1955), the 'Dragonfly' hybrids, the 'Olympia' strain and the 'Mrs. Scott Elliott' strain are a few of these. Biedermeier Mixed make sturdy 12- to 18-inch plants that perform well in southern California, I'm told. They bear a profusion of double- and single-flowered upward-facing blooms in a mix of colors and bicolors. In windy weather, the large blossoms seem almost to dance atop their long, wiry stems. In European gardens, short-spurred versions of A. x hybrida are more popular. The short sprus indicate relatively more A. vulgarize parentage.
How Columbines Grow
Columbines fall into two basic size groupings: tall and dwarf. The dwarf types, which usually remain under one foot in height and bear blossoms one to two inches in diameter. They are an excellent choice for rock gardens, where their dainty scale can be displayed to advantage. Space them about six inches apart.
Taller types may grow to two or three feet, and the flowers are often two or three times the size of the smaller types. These plants need space: Mature specimens may spread their leaves over ran area up to two feet wide, though some of this foliage can be cut back without harming the plants. They show up well in the back of a mixed border or the center of an island bed.
The spreading leaves of tall columbine are an asset in some situations; I have some tiny spring-blooming bulbs planted around a large granny's bonnet columbine, and its attractive foliage (blue-green with a silver reverse, and divided like oversized maidenhair fern foliage) helps to hide the yellowing scilla leaves.
Most columbines grow happily in sun or part shade, though here in my northern climate, the blossoms seem to be more numerous when they have at least half a day of sun. In warmer regions plants need correspondingly more shade. In Texas and southern California, dappled shade is preferred. In most regions, peak bloom time is from mid-spring to early summer, usually around May or June.
All the above varieties tend to self-sow, A. vulgarize freely and the dwarf cultivars somewhat less so. Hybrid seedlings may differ in appearance from their parents, and some may revert to wild types. Seedlings may easily be removed where they are not wanted. The hybrids are usually longer-lived than the species, but columbine's tendency to self-sow, which allows the species types to perpetuate themselves, somewhat offsets this characteristic.
Good drainage is key to getting as many years out of a planting as possible. Roots prefer to remain undisturbed so plant where you want them to grow. In general, either shallow soils or containers don't work well because each plant needs room for a long taproot.
Columbines are nearly pest free, although their foliage is sometimes plagued by leaf miners. These insects appear only to cause cosmetic damage, however, and not shorten the life of the plant nor curtail bloom production. In some areas, powdery mildew occurs in spring. Apider mites are sometimes a problem in warm climates.
You can prolong the bloom season by pinching off faded flowers, but I usually let mine develop the characteristic prongedseed heads, which are attractive in their own right and add interest to the garden in winter. Hardy plants, columbines need no special autumn care or winter protection, though it is advisable to clean up the foliage after it yellows to discourage the overwintering of slugs and insects. Simplest is to cut off all foliage in fall; healthy new leaves soon appear. Dr. Steve George, Texas AM University horticulturist in Dallas, recommends that southern gardeners remove all foliage by late July to early August if plants are plagued by pests. They'll regrow vigorously with the cooler temperatures in fall.
What's in a Name?
The numerous common names given to members of the genus Aquilegia indicates the affection which gardeners over the centuries have held for these charming plants. The most familiar name, Columbine, comes from the Latin columbinus, meaning "like a dove." In early Christian art, the columbine symbolizes the Holy Ghost, which is also represented by a dove. And the name was shared with Columbine, Harlequin's beautiful and "dovelike" ladylove in the commedia dell'arte, an improvised theatrical presentation that was popular in Italy during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
An alternate common name for the short-spurred types is" doves-round-a-dish." The doves become apparent when the blossom is held upside down -- the curving spurs form the beaks and the flaring sepals the doves' wings.
The name "granny's bonnet," given to A. vulgarize, shows that I (with my childhood jester's caps) was not the first to notice the similarity these intricate flowers have to fanciful headgear.
The derivation of the Latin name Aquilegia is not entirely certain. Perhaps is refers to the resemblance the curving, pointed seedpods have to the claws of an eagle.
Kathleeen S. Van Horn is a freelance writer in western New York.
Copyright NGA
Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.
Remembering Columbines