OUTER SPACE FLOWERS – Gardening

In many places in the United States columbines (Aquilegia ssp.) still grow wild. Highbrow hybrids dominate the marketplace, but even they seem to retain some of that wildness. While cleaning out an overgrown greenhouse once, I noticed columbines of indeterminate variety growing up through the cracks between the slate floor’s slabs. In my own garden they tend to self-seed, coming up everywhere but where I intend them to be. They are much like cats, domesticated to a point, but still inclined to go their own way.

Shakespeare celebrated columbines in his works, as did Chaucer. They have been cultivated in Europe for centuries, and in America ever since John Winthrop, an early Puritan leader and governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, introduced a European variety, probably Aquilegia vulgaris, here in the 1630’s. A 1792 engraving of this species from a book on medicinal plants is in the archives of the English Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In an early case of cross-cultural exchange, the great English plantsman, John Tradescant, the younger, visited the young Virginia colony and sent seeds of native North American Aquilegia canadensis back to England in 1640. No matter where you live, if you have a cottage-style garden, you probably have some columbines in among the roses and hollyhocks.

The red and yellow Aquilegia canadensis that intrigued Tradescant is one of the most common native columbines. Despite its Canadian species name, it blithely ignores manmade boundaries and flourishes in much of the United States. With its nodding, complex flowers, it is characteristic of many plants in the genus. Individual blossoms are composed of several small, elongated trumpets or bells that flare at the tips. Aquilegia canadensis