The Field Scabious are high summer flowers. Hovering, lilac-blue and dusk-luminous once the meadows turn tawny. They arrive as the heat comes into July and hold well into August, the month of wild carrot and twisting bindweed. A time of dark greens, pale fields and ripening as the energy shifts towards berry and seed.
I step a number of cultivated scabious into the garden as the first round of summer perennials pass and begin to change the tone to maintain vitality and provide a succession of forage for pollinators in August. We are lucky enough here to have room to allow them to repeat and the original plantings of Scabiosa ochroleuca have migrated along the paths where they are happiest on the edge of things. I leave the seedlings where there is room, their filigree foliage being distinctive and easy to winkle out if they look like they might overwhelm their chosen company. When happy, a seedling can make flower in the first year and go on to be in their prime in the second and third. Though they will live longer, the older a plant becomes, the more it is prone to splay and showing its middle, so I keep them on rotation, removing the eldest and editing the seedlings so that I look like I rule the roost and they don’t.
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