columbines

The Aquilegia, or columbines, are just opening in the back garden.  Strange that the same flower can be named after both an eagle and a dove.  They are also called Granny's Bonnets, though I don't remember my grandmother ever wearing a bonnet, and certainly not one that looked like an Aquilegia.  I love them and have planted many over the years, mostly raised from seed.  Since they are not the longest lived plants, but cross breed promiscuously and seed generously, I don't recognise most of the existing population as being anything I planted, and have no idea what they should be called.

One looks as though it might be a surviving A. clematiflora.  The flowers are a dusky pink, about four centimetres in diameter, with four rows of fairly narrow petals held wide open around a yellow boss that's dusty with pollen.  A few of the petals have green tips, and it does look for all the world like the flower of a double form of Clematis viticella.

Its neighbour could also be taken for a small, late flowering clematis, if you only saw the flowers in isolation.  They are little dusky purple bells formed of two gappy rows of green-tipped petals, again surrounding a bright yellow centre.  I am fairly sure that this is one of nature's inventions, and not something I got directly from a seed catalogue, but it is extremely pretty.  Aquilegia do tend to revert to plain mid purple bells over time, but this flower is unusually dark.

Round the corner is another plant whose flowers show traces of spurs, the nectar bearing tubes sticking out behind the petals, which some varieties don't have at all, and others have so deep that it would take some long-tongued moth, if not an actual humming bird, to exploit them.  The inner row of petals are ivory white, their edges rolled over and fused at the base to form the spurs, while the five outer petals are pointed, slightly ruffled, and streaked and mottled with violet.  It is very pretty, but not especially scented.  According to my gardening notes, which admittedly are not always one hundred per cent accurate, the only forms I've planted in that bed are A. clematiflora and A. fragrans, but the latter is supposed to have long spurs, and to be yellow and white rather than tinged with pink, so the plant must be yet another home made hybrid.

Aquilegia specialise in combining yellow and pink in the same flower, but do it so nicely that the result is never anything but charming.  The last two flowers I picked are both typical columbines, with an inner cup of five smaller, more rounded petals leading down to long spurs, and an outer ring of five longer, more pointed ones.  The first has a yellow cup and pink outer petals, again with that greenish tinge.  The spurs are pink, each ending in a little bulbous base.  The cup of the second is larger relative to the outer petals, and its bright, soft yellow carries right down the spurs, while the outer petals are melon pink.  A further examination of the rose bed would yield umpteen variations on the theme.

The similarities between come columbines and clematis are less surprising when you remember that they are both members of the family Ranunculaceae, or buttercup.