Well, it's hardly a spectacular success this time round, but I am still claiming one cup-of-tea's worth of self-bestowed job satisfaction for this 12-month-long effort, now bursting into bloom.
Last autumn I planted some "Love-in-a-Mist" seeds which I had harvested in January from the plants which I had grown from seed the previous autumn, and which flowered in October.
Hold on. That's a bit complicated. Here's the simpler version. These flowers below are from plants which I have raised from seed which I had harvested earlier on. That's better.
The original seeds came from a Yates Seed
pack called "Persian Jewels". These come in various
shades of white, violet, blue and pink. The interesting
challenge for me was to see whether this year's
crop of harvested seeds produced all the colours, or
just one. Well, it turns out I get lots of white, a fair
few blue, and little blobs of pink here and there.
That will do me!
As you can see, white rules, but other colours get a look in.
The pink ones are pretty but lonely.
The "Mist" in its name is of course the whispy veil of fine,
needles of foliage around the flower heads.
However, this low angle shot reveals the plant is a little
cloud of flowers floating atop a green mist, too.
In the interest of the full picture, here's a shot taken in early
January this year, of the papery, hollow seed pods after harvest.
These split open and drop a lot of seed on the ground, but
my harvest managed to gather enough seed to fill the whole
backyard with plants, if I wanted to go mad.
The black seeds themselves are heavily ridged and hard.
I planted them last autumn in rows, and they do take a while
to come up, and the plants look like they are never going
to ever produce flowers through August and most of
September. Then in October they get a move on, and flowering
is always about now, in mid-October.