About this variety
Grown for the seed heads, not the flowers. The pale blue pincushions are pleasant and brief and beside the point. What follows is a perfect papery sphere built from cone-shaped bracts tessellated across its surface like a small geodesic dome, on wiry stems at 60 to 90cm.
They open pale green, ripen through golden-bronze with dark veining, and finish warm parchment. Dried, they hold their shape and colour for years, and there is nothing else in the catalogue with that geometry.
Harvest timing is the whole thing, and the window is only two or three weeks. Cut when the globes are light green to golden-bronze with dark edges. Leave them past full ripeness and they split, scatter and collapse, and the dried value is gone.
The stems are slender and will flop in a summer storm, so get twiggy pea sticks in when the plants are 20 or 30cm rather than after the event. It wants full sun and lean, well-drained, neutral to alkaline soil, and it does poorly on heavy wet clay.
