Thursday, September 18, 2008

Spider Flowers (Cleome)

As a follow-up to my earlier post about self-seeders, here are some additional pictures of this season's spider flowers (cleome) that better capture their beauty and complexity.

"Spider flowers (cleome) are big and are sometimes hard to plant in the garden without them looking like stiff soldiers. But once spider flowers are allowed to self seed, it transforms them. They look very natural growing through other plants and often to different heights depending on where they are.
They also have a range of color. In the front of Goldberry Hill, I only allow violet ones. In the Egg Garden, I try to keep more white than pink. In the Children's Garden, they are mostly pink because my daughter loves pink. Also, as the first plants become leggy, plants from seed which germinated later reach up to cover up the old bare stalks."

3 comments:

joco said...

Hiya,

They are indeed spectacular in flower. I have always ignored them, but this post will make me look at them again and give them a go.

I enjoyed the linked post very much.It makes me realize that my garden is more than 50% self-sown.

Shibaguyz said...

We've never seen this flower before. Very striking graphic plant. Thanks for sharing!

JGH said...

Very happy to hear that these are self-seeders! I put a few in this year that I took from another garden and am hoping they come back. Yours are such a pretty pink.

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