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.
Share 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.
To read the rest of this story please go to: The Oregonian
