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The Allium christophii seed heads pictured here are held motionless in the thinnest coating of frost. On a freezing winter morning the tiny seed pods, and the remains of the flowers behind them, gleam softly in the early sun.
It has just occurred to me that it’s unusual for a seed head to retain the remains of the flower like this. The petals have lost their colour and their edges have curled inwards. They’ve shrunk a little as they’ve dried too, but those petals are still there. Now they are little icy stars.
You can see what those stars looked like while the flower was still alive:
The living flowers are lilac, with a delicate metallic sheen. Already the green seed pods are forming in the centre of each individual floret. If you look closely you’ll see that there’s also an inner ring of filaments. (These are the lower part of the stamens, which would have held the anthers.) Their tapered, almost spiky, appearance makes them look like another set of much smaller petals.
Now my imagination is playing with the idea of having the ‘ghosts’ of the year’s flowers sprinkled throughout the garden. For company, the alliums would have hydrangeas (as in last week’s post) and perhaps, if there were any late flowers, astrantias. (But in both of these plants, what look like petals are not. The hydrangea has minute flowers surrounded by showy sepals and the astrantia has large bracts around a tiny pincushion-like arrangement of true flowers. Perhaps that is why they keep their flowery appearance for longer.)
Hmm, I wonder if a slightly spooky winter garden would be fun… 🙂
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 