#salvia patens cambridge blue

True Blue Flowers at the allotment /part 2

I’ve complained over and over about how I missed having the time to write and share plant stuff, but it feels so odd I’m now back at it only because we’re on quarantine, and suddenly have ALL the time I could possibly need.  

This said, I thought I’d go on with the true blue flowers series I started many moons ago, so here you have two plants I bought last summer in the garden centre where I work. They are unrelated, but the colour of their flowers matched in a lovely way. 

The first is Salvia patens ‘Cambridge Blue’, or gentian sage, a gorgeous cultivar of the Mexican herbaceous perennial species. It flowers profusely through summer well into autumn forming a neat, aromatic clump and it’s best treated like a dahlia, lifting the fleshy tuberous root system before winter and storing it away from hard frost. Bees obviously love the large lipped flowers.

The second is Delphinium grandiflorum ‘Summer Blues’, or Siberian larkspur, a short-lived herbaceous perennial much different from the large and sturdy larkspurs part of the D. elatum species. It doesn’t grow much taller than 30 or 40 cm and both foliage and flowers are quite dainty, but extremely vibrant. The blossoms, opening over several weeks through summer, look as if they had been painted with watercolours and go on to produce a good number of seeds to ensure self-sowing.