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ColumbineDiscover Texas gold in your garden. |
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Transcript: Columbine
I think Texans taking a Colorado vacation have wasted enough money on little blue spruce trees and columbine seeds to buy a ski resort. Both of them are not adapted to our Texas climate..The Blue columbines and many colors you can buy as seed packets may make it one year, but then they're our of here; they just aren't ready for Texas. Actually, we have a columbines that are native here that do very well in our climate.
One of them is Hinckley's columbine. Hinkley's makes a yellow flower with long, attractive spurs on the back. These do well in a bright shade or dappled sun location. The plants come up in the fall, form a nice little mound of blueish-green leaves that's really quite attractive through the winter, and then in the spring they burst forth with a lot of bloom for a couple of months.
There's another columbine that's red that's also native to the central Texas hill country along moist creeks and seeps in the ravines of the hills.
Be advised that if you plant both the yellow Hinckley's columbine and the red native columbine, they'll cross so the seed produced the following year creates flowers that are a mix between the two which are really quite attractive.
Columbines will often survive from one year to the next if you keep the soil moderately moist. If it gets really dry, the original plant may die but they will reseed and come back for another season.
So save your money on columbine seed; use it to take a ski vacation this winter. Buy instead one of our Texas tough native columbines. With your common sense tip on beautifying your garden and saving you money, I'm Skip Richter.
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Last Updated:
July 6, 2006