Beginner Gardening: What happened to my delphinium???, 1 by 2zeus

2zeus wrote:
I think it may be more a result of our climate being quite similar to Great Britain, (where delphiniums thrive,) than anything I've done, since as you can tell from my post, I tend to garden with the philosophy of benign neglect. I find it fascinating how everyone has such different experiences with the same plant. Maybe they don't like real heat? Even in mid-summer, we don't get what you'd call "hot weather." Hot for us, mildly warm for you, eh?

I did forget to mention that I've tried getting them as bedding plants, and they never did much - my own thinking on this is again, too much fertiliser, to get them to bloom in the small pots, as anything blooming apparently sells much more quickly.

It sounds as though your soil is very similar to mine - I top-dress with amendments, but gave up digging large planting holes and filling them with great soil for my plants, because I could never see any appreciable difference in doing so - and found that plants have a tendency to then refuse to grow out into the surrounding clay from the nice stuff in the immediate area.

I agree with Marshmellow (I love that name) about the New Zealand ones - they have spectacular colours. Really impressive. Here's one of theirs grown from seed last year - luscious!