Eryngium Species, Miss Willmott's Ghost, Giant Sea Holly

I purchased a packet of seeds at Great Dixter in 2013. Out of that packet, only three seeds germinated, and that took a long time. I ma...Read Morenaged to keep two plants alive and one of these bloomed this summer. One 2 1/2 foot stalk with 29 blooms. It is now mid-August and the stalk is yellowing and dying. The rosette of leaves has disappeared, so I'm assuming the plant is indeed biennial. The other plant looks very healthy and will hopefully bloom next year. I'm hoping for lots of self-seeding because the blooms looked very beautiful and exotic in my Zone 4 garden, nobody else in my Minneapolis neighborhood has them and I'm very proud to have grown them from seed.

Beautiful and subtle. Most sea hollies have conspicuous spiny blue bracts, but this ones' are green and silver. So far my plants have bee...Read Moren under two feet tall.

Biennial, but mine have self-sown as advertised. Eryngium seed are notoriously ephemeral, so most purchased seed is hard to germinate. I started with a purchased plant. I've allowed two seedlings to live, and the first to reach bloom is a little over a foot high. Perhaps it will be taller under more favorable conditions---it only gets a few hours of direct sun. Or perhaps it is a seed strain bred for compactness.

If you're wondering how it got its common name, Ellen Wilmott (1858-1934) was an influential and famously eccentric English horticulturist who exhausted her substantial inheritance on her gardens. She was known to scatter seeds of Eryngium giganteum surreptitiously when visiting others' gardens, whose owners would later wonder where these plants had mysteriously come from---a ghost of her presence.

Impatiently, I tried to start seeds of this Sea Holly outside in spring, even though all sources, including Botanical Interests, couldn't...Read More ensure results. Then we had a very wet spring, and cool summer, and not a ghost of a seedling. These are popular in the area, so, now that it is fall, I shall try my hand at it again.

thank goodness there are lots of gardening styles!!! I love all eryngia and this biennial form is a favourite. Its true it sows itself ...Read Morearound, but that just means it puts itself in some places I wouldn't have thought of. A fabulous dried plant and an essential in a silver border!