Slugs and Salal: Flowers

CALENDULA

One of the special joys of gardening comes with the colorful reminders of one's own personal gardening history that surface throughout the yard each year. I mean the volunteer flowers, like amiable hauntings from planting seasons past, that gift the garden with patches of nostalgic remembering.

This year many spots in my own garden were highlighted with the little lacy-leaved, fan-shaped annual Corydalis sempervirens, whose blue-gray, lacy foliage highlights little pink and yellow flowers. This is a plant that has for me warm family memories. Poppies, both old-fashioned corn poppies and flamboyant peony-flowered kinds, are yearly guests throughout my garden.

But of all the floral return engagements to grace my garden regularly I think I value the calendula, flower of the month for October, the most.

During the spring several short, many-branched mounds of brilliant orange double-flowered calendulas bring cheering areas of sunny color to a bed of perennial flowers in my front yard. Then, throughout the summer more orange calendulas bloom at pleasant intervals in the vegetable garden.

Plants bearing tall, bright yellow single calendula blooms appeared in a new cut flower mixture I tried this year. If I decide to let that plot of ground host a rerun of self-sown summer flowers next year from this planting, the calendulas will surely reappear among them. This summer I even had calendulas blooming in some old planter boxes stashed at the edge of the garden along a stretch of fenceline -- testimony to the plants' easy-growing nature.

Another patch of these cheering flowers has brought a cottage garden style of simple loveliness to one corner of the fire pit in the middle of my back yard, directly opposite the door of the garden shed. Here, tall orange calendulas have bloomed in and above a cloud of bue borage -- all self-seeded -- from about mid-August onward.

In other parts of the garden young calendula plants have emerged that will give bloom through the fall, and perhaps even during the winter if the weather remains mild. This flower's name, from the Latin calendae meaning the first day of the month, alludes to the plant's hardiness and ability to bloom through most of the year.

MEDIEVAL PEDIGREE

Numerous references in thirteenth and fourteenth century English literature to Calendula officinalis (meaning the official version of the plant for use in medicine) indicate that this Mediterranean native, often called simply "Gold", was well known and commonly grown by those times.

John Turner, a 16th century botanist, had this comment to make about one contemporary use for "Golde": "Some use to make their heyre yelow wyth the floure of this herbe, not beying content with the natural colour, which God hath gyven them".
John Gerard, a 16th century herbalist, tells us that in Holland grocers kept dried calendula petals by the barrelfull for use in "broths, physical potions, and for divers other purposes....insomuch that no broths are well made without dried marigolds. The fact that any food cooked in a pot was considered incomplete, naked even, without petals of the single-flowered Calendula officinalis gave rise to the plant's common name pot marigold. The petals were popular also as a cheap substitute for saffron.

VARIETIES

Calendula varieties commonly available today have double flowers in a range of colors from orange through apricot shades to bright yellow and cream. Pacific Beauty is a popular cutting variety 18 inches tall, with large, double flowers in a broad color range. Stokes offers Pacific Beauty in seven separate shades. Bon Bon is an early, compact, bushy form about 12 inches tall. Touch of Red is a 14-inch mixture of double-flowered bicolors in red, yellow and orange, each petal brushed with red at the tip.

CULTURE

Calendulas will bloom in any sunny or mostly sunny place that is not soggy or full of competing roots. But in my experience the plants look their best and produce the most lavish display of flowers in a moist soil that is fairly fertile. I seed this hardy annual outdoors where I want the plants to bloom, in March or early April. Letting some plants go to seed guarantees extended seasons of bloom in subsequent years. Tall varieties blend well with other old-fashioned flowers for an English cottage garden look. Low mounding types lend sunny, cheering notes to the front of flowerbeds.

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