Cool Plant of the Week!

This weeks cool plant is another native annual. Gilia tricolor is endemic to California and found in the foothills and valley as well as on the coast.  It is so easy to grow from seed that I think it is well worth giving a try even if you don’t live in California.

With its bright blue anthers and petals of lavender, maroon, and yellow perhaps “Gilia quadricolor” would have been a better name.

It is a great filler or companion, I have some growing with Orlaya and Scabiosa.  Each plant is covered with hundreds of little blooms on ferny foliage that waves and bounces in the breeze.  Kind of like a pale purple Gypsophila or Heliophila. I consider this a must for the spring garden now. My only regret is that I didn’t grow more of them.  Something I plan on remedying next year.

Pinching Seedlings

For some reason I always dread pinching back young plants and seedlings to encourage bushy growth even though I know it is the right thing to do.  It does create a slight delay in plants so that they will bloom a bit later but it also creates sturdier growth that is less top heavy and less inclined to be weighted down by heavy flowers.  Also the more stems you have the more flowers you will have in the long run so it is well worth doing.

Here is my flat of Helipterum roseum ‘Pierrot’ seedlings growing very nicely. (please excuse my ghetto nursery facilities. The bricks are to hold the bird netting over my seedlings).

But you can see up close that each one has one strong central stem and lots of little ones at the base.  This is caused by apical dominance.  The plant hormone auxin suppresses the growth of the lateral side shoots creating one strong sturdy stem or trunk.

Just snip out that dominant stem and you basically release the side stems from their bondage!  It is so painful to do though when you have nurtured and babied your little seedlings.

But look at how dramatic the results are.  Just nine days later and the side shoots have tripled in size.  I may pinch them again so that smaller shoots at the base are released to grow but I think I’ll wait a bit longer and see how these do.

Look how much bulkier all the plants look in their flat in just nine days!  Quite a change from the first picture.

I should mention that this is generally only needed for plants with a strong upright stem.  In the photo above the Nemophila menziesii ‘Penny Black’ on the left and the Gilia tricolor on the right form flat rosettes so there really isn’t anything to pinch.  You could pinch out early flowering stems perhaps, if they are blooming too soon and you want more energy to go into plant growth, but the effectiveness of this varies from plant to plant.

All these seedlings in my nursery are really doing well and are almost ready to go into the ground.  Which is good news because I have several new batches ready to go out and I am running out of room!