It likes shade and it has some nice blooms. Care to tell me what it is? I bought it at Evergreen's and they didn't have it labeled, and the receipt is no help. The flowers come in purple, white and pink.
Please tell me what you know about them. I really like them so far since I planted them about a week ago.
Here are the lavender flowers... two-tone with white!
...and the white blooms.
I hope this stuff spreads real nice underneath my roebelinii and Kentia!
almost forgot the pink blooms..
Beautiful Columbines, Aquilegia is the genus
Jackie
Thanks Jackie.
Columbines, eh? That's kind of weird I ask this on the day of the school shooting at Va. Tech.
It looks from what I can find out about them is that they like sun more than shade but will take some shade.
Is it considered a tropical? Sure looks tropical to me...
Is it a perennial or annual?
Perennial, but it seeds very, very freely for me. I finally dug it up, but unfortunately the seeds still pop up in the garden, in the compost, in the greenhouse, as so forth. I am still attempting to eradicate it. Look at the leaves in 6-8 weeks and tell us that you don't have leafminers.
SB
Is it actually used as a ground cover in CA?
They're definitely not tropical, I think they're hardy to about zone 3 or 4. I'm also not sure if it'll make a really good groundcover--it will reseed so it'll spread that way but it's not going to be the sort of groundcover that'll do a great job at keeping out weeds, etc.
Great! So I've planted an extremely invasive, non-tropical, semi-crappy groundcover that invites leafminer bugs into the garden. Oh yeah it just happens to have beautiful flowers...
Maybe I should move them into our color bowls we have located around our pool. I planted them in the hopes of some nice flowering groundcover that would look good in the shade of the palms that provide a great canopy up above... but I've had it with the invasive species... It took about 5 years to eradicate some of the stuff I've had growing back there including horsetail and honeysuckle... Not to mention this stuff that my former neighbor (he's since moved away) that makes "a refreshing summertime drink" when blended with sugar and water. Forgot what it was, but it had small round glossy leaves that grew as a sort of underground-rooted vine.
They are not a problem here. Lowes and Home Depot sell them every
yr. Kinda pricey too. Putting them in pots sounds like a good idea to keep
them from popping up everywhere if they're going to be a problem in your
area. The flowers alone on the columbines make them worth growing.
Everything I grow here in the summer
attracts some kind of pest. Spider mites being my biggest problem.
Jackie
I wouldn't call it invasive, there's a difference between plants that reseed readily and ones that are invasive. My mom grew these in Ohio and I've grown them here in CA and have never seen them become a problem either place. Sounds like stressbaby's had some problems with it so it may spread more readily in some areas than others, but I would not call it "highly invasive" by any means, you could do a lot worse! If you want more evidence of whether it's nice or not, go look up some of the entries for Aquilegia in Plant Files, if lots of people who live near you have posted negative comments about it spreading then I'd get rid of it, but otherwise I don't think it'll be a big deal. And the seedpods are pretty obvious, so as long as you don't have a ton of plants you can just pull them off when they start to form, problem solved.
Here in Minnesota, columbines spread via seed every year, but they don't end up EVERYWHERE like morning glories. They put on a lovely show in the spring, but are done blooming by early summer. The plants then slowly decline into fall.
I agree with ecrane3 - they don't make very good groundcovers, but they are delightful and not really invasive.
Erick
Well I guess I feel better now... thanks for the encouragement. I was going to place them in pots when I get home from work today, but I think I'll just let them be for now. They really are pretty and the flowers are starting to bloom in bunches.
Hopefully the leafminer thing is not a problem in my area. I'll be keeping a keen eye out for them though.
Gosh, I didn't realize I sounded so negative! If you can dead head the flowers before the seeds mature they aren't a problem. I was never able to get to them in a timely fashion.
SB
By mid-summer, I have quite a bit of leaf miner damage on my columbines, but the foliage in general is declining by that point and starting to look cruddy. One tactic to keep the leaf miner damage to a minimum is to remove the infected leaves when you see them. Or just not fuss over them at all and accept that a few bugs are part of gardening. They don't impact the flowers (to my knowledge).
I suggest planting something that blooms later in the season, e.g. cannas, glads, etc. amongst your columbines. That way, as the columbines progressively fall apart as fall approaches, a new fabulous show begins!
Erick
By the way, stressbaby is correct in that you will have columbines everywhere in your garden in coming years, as the seeds are small and easily travel. Some I pull or rake out, but some I let be for splash of spring color in a new spot.
Erick
I guess I need to decide right now if I'm going to grow these.
I'm trying to control the color spots, more or less in the garden.
Hmmmm. Thanks everyone, the info on here is so helpful.
Oh I like them ! Very pretty.
Here are some more pics. In only a little over a week, the flowers are really starting to take off!
This plant seems to be shooting two different colors of flowers!
Purple and white...together in one plant.
This message was edited Apr 18, 2007 11:03 AM
Maybe the seed are already beginning to spread. Note how the purple variety is already dropping the flowers!
So now I have to decide if I want to keep these beauties where they are...
Decisions, decisions!
Sorry for the pic repost. It won't let me delete the dupe image for some reason. Oh well
This message was edited Apr 18, 2007 11:08 AM
It's way too soon for you to have seedlings already come up and blooming. The plant that looks like it has purple flowers and white flowers is two separate plants, probably whoever was growing these originally had mixed color seeds, and these two seedlings grew very close together and never got separated when they were thinning the seedlings and wound up potted up together, so now it looks like one plant but is really two.
I realize that it's way too soon for the seedlings to start popping up, but if I let them grow where they are, I'm assuming I'll have plenty of them next year and I'm trying to decide if want that or not.
I figured that the purple and white blooms might be two different plants, but it's hard to crawl under my roebelinii (spines!) to check it out more closely. Thanks for the info!
FoF,
Humming birds LOVE columbine. :) The seedling's leaves look exactly like the adult leaves, so they *are* relatively easy to identify and destroy. Around here they function well as a medium hieght bedding plant, and they're a staple of cottage gardens. I'm not sure how well they'll do with all of your sun and heat but there are at least three species of columbine that are California natives, aquilegia formosa, aquilegia pubescens, and aquilegia exima.
You can tell the INS that your columbines aren't illegal aliens. :)
-Joe G.
I have them planted in a pretty shady spot, right under a Pygmy date palm (Phoenix roebelinii).
But it will get hot later this summer, and by then, they will have lost their blooms, correct? What does the rest of the plant look like in mid-to-late summer?
If you dead head the flowers to prevent seed you can cut back the flower stems when they've died. You'll just have little clumps of delicate gingko-like leaves until the days get shorter. I am not sure if columbine are evergreen without a killing frost.
You could always intersperse them with something else that starts growing a bit later in the season, and the columbine could just be cool-weather fill-ins. :)
I'm not sure what emerges when in your zone, maybe some Siam tulips? They're gingers, roscoea, I believe, and I think you can cut them back annually, giving your columbine a chance to peak out. :)
-Joe
Those Aquilegias look like the Songbird series, and they make very few seed at all. That's why they are often so expensive, and they don't normally flower until the second year.
I have some I grew from seed, they had to be hand pollinated so the seed was expensive for named varieties, the flowers are large and plants fairly dwarf. The seed pods are twisted and sticky, with a few non-viable seeds (brown) and even less viable (black). From some seed I took off them I got about 4 plants from 2 different colours.
Songbird series! Who knew. Well that's really good to know about those...
I just might keep 'em around. They've even got more flowers now.
They were around $8.50 each for the three plants. Does that seem expensive for those?
That's about what you would pay here for a good hybrid plant. I paid over £3 a packet for 10 seeds several years ago, that's over $6.
What size pots did you buy them in? If they were in 4" pots that seems a bit pricey but if they were gallons then that's about normal. Although if they're a special hybrid that's hard to find even that price for a 4" pot might be normal.
They were in 1 gal. containers. They were already pretty developed with blooms and buds when I planted 'em.
