Maybe it's an aging thing, this disenchantment with ostentatious beauty, but humbler flowers increasingly look better all the time.
Handsome is precisely as handsome does, which is what makes
Astrantia major
and its cultivars such astonishingly worthwhile plants. Not only are these woodland garden lovers easy to warm up to, but they only feign homeliness. Fact is, these are deliciously showy plants.
What's misleading is the flowers' resemblance to Queen Anne's lace (
Daucus carota
, same family), with tidbits of blooms displayed in a parasol-shaped cluster that makes you think, weedy. Get past this prejudice and each tidbit reveals itself as a constellation of tiny fertile flowers surrounded by a conspicuous collar of infertile bracts, the whole truth a complex and beguiling arrangement of cuteness, color and form.
Consider the cultivar 'Hadspen Blood.' It's a vigorous and mounding 2-foot perennial with cut leaves reminiscent of hardy geraniums. A nonstop display of dark red moody flowers vibrates above the foliage. Equal in value to the bloodiest dianthus, it's a saturated color you don't expect in the shade.
Or let's talk about
A. major
ssp.
involucrata
'Shaggy' (syn. 'Margery Fish'), a startling tri-tone job with green-dipped, white bracts tinged pink near the base, at least twice as long as the compact flower cluster inside. Its overall effect is beguilingly bright and it works like a footlight among taller plants.
Astrantia
is no overnight sensations. Even as cut flowers, they can last two weeks, and if left on the stem and pinched back to lateral buds, they'll often rebloom. Easygoing to the point of rabble-rousing, these moisture lovers will also self-seed; if you let them proliferate you'll probably end up with everything but what you started with, in colors ranging from white through pink and on to ruby red.
Of course, the thought of an
Astrantia
-mad garden may not delight you, in which case, after the second flush of pleasure, cut all flowering stems to the ground.
AT A GLANCE
COMMON NAME:
Masterwort
SIZE:
30 inches tall, 24 inches wide
HARDINESS:
Minus 20
SUN TO PART SHADE
EVEN MOISTURE
THUMBS UP:
Easygoing, richly colored, long-blooming perennial
A CLOSER LOOK AT ASTRANTIA
A. maxima.
Flowers larger, more rose-pink than white; leaves 3-parted; intriguing
A. major
cultivars:
'Alba.' Pure white; striking in shade
'Lars.' Dark red flowers, long green dipped bracts
'Rosensinfonie.' Rosy pink flowers with silver collar of bracts
'Ruby Wedding.' Dark red flowers, purple stems, darkish leaves; seedlings possibly more stable than 'Hadspen Blood.' Also on the Great Plant Picks list (see below).
'Sunningdale Variegated.' Greenish white to pink-blushed flower; light green leaves splashed with creamy gold variegation, strongest in spring.
ON THE GREAT PLANT PICKS LIST:
Two species and five cultivars have been selected by the professional horticulturists behind
as especially good performers for Pacific Northwest gardens:
A.
'Buckland'
A. major
A. major
'Claret'
A. major
'Roma'
A. major
'Rubra'
A. major
'Ruby Wedding'
A. maxima
– Ketzel Levine
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