Scarlet Windflower

Family: Ranunculaceae (Buttercup family)
Genus: Anemone
Featured hybrid: Anemone x fulgens

I think of “wind” when I think of March. This has nothing to do with the fact that I live in the Pacific Northwest. No, it stems from my elementary-school days, when I loved to help my teachers with their monthly bulletin boards. Each month had something fun and interesting to color and cut out…all except for March. Wedged between the flashy red hearts for February and the baskets and bouquets of pastel flowers for April, March offered only uniformly sized and all-green shamrocks. Not much decorating potential there. The teachers always ended up relying on one particular image, year after year. Even today, when I see a March calendar, I can still visualize Mr. Wind, a puffy cloud of a creature with his friendly eyes, pouched cheeks, and pursed lips, pushing breezes across the days of March from the upper left corner of the bulletin board.

So wind it will be for the Plant of the Month this March—in the form of windflower, the common name given by many people to all spring-blooming anemones. Even the genus name, Anemone, derives from the Greek and means “daughter of the wind,” or so say many. Others hold to the theory that the name originated with Naamaan, the Semitic form of Adonis, drops of whose spilled blood were said to have turned into A. coronaria. Brightly colored anemones are thought to be the Biblical “lilies of the field.” Without putting too fine a point on word origins here, we can know that the spring-blooming forms of Anemone are ancient and native to the Mediterranean and Middle East.

The specific plant featured this month is Anemone x fulgens, a hybrid noted for its scarlet flowers—when fulgens is spotted as a modifier, the subject is going to be flashy and, most often, red. Anemone x fulgens follows that lead. Its color might slip over into “garish” if it weren’t part of Mother Nature’s color scheme. Let’s face it, she can get away with color combinations that would make us mere mortals swoon if we were stuck with them in our living rooms. Take a look at some of the Grecian wallflowers (A. blanda), for example. Interestingly, the colors of autumn-blooming anemones are much more delicate—but the fall bloomers of this genus will have to be left for a later column. Suffice it to say that there are more than 120 species of Anemone, and more named varieties and cultivars. If they catch your fancy, you can have steady anemone blooms through three seasons.

Your Anemone x fulgens—a hybrid according to botanists that is often assumed by horticulturalists to be a species, when they drop the x—grows from small black tubers that should be planted from October to November in Whatcom County. You can make successive plantings for staggered blooms. Look for the faint circle that marks the smoother top of the tubers, and plant them with their “feet” facing down, placed about 3 inches below the surface in a sunny bed with a rich soil mix, amended with bone meal or bulb food applied according to package directions. If you do not plan to thoroughly moisten the bed immediately after planting, then soak the tubers for a few hours just before you put them in the ground. To be on the safe side, you might want to mulch the beds and be prepared to gently move your mulch aside in the spring to check for signs of growth, at which point you’ll want to have your snail deterrent of choice, handy.

If you didn’t put any tubers out last fall but you must have anemones this spring, you can find growing varieties in the nursery centers soon. Anemone x fulgens can be spotted because of the red flowers, two inches across, with no white on them. The named St. Bavo strain offers a range of reds, from pinkish to rusty. Anemone x fulgens is larger than the commonly seen A. coronaria hybrids, marked by white at the base of their petals, but it has the same green collar just below the bloom, which rises on a single stem that can reach higher than 18 inches. When you find them, plant your Anemone x fulgens in rich soil in a bed with at least partial sun, treat them well with ample water, and enjoy their bloom for up to four weeks. Don’t count on these—or others from tubers you’ve planted—to return next spring, however. Anemones are notoriously balky about repeat blooms. If you want to try, be sure and leave all foliage on the plant until it’s completely dry. The old books suggest putting a pane of glass right on top and leaving it there until the foliage has not a trace of life left. Then lift the tuber, dust it off, and store it for the summer in a cool, dry place before setting it out again in the fall. Anemones will not naturalize; and they will require this special treatment each year. Some of us prefer to buy “new” tubers every fall.

Anemones can be grown from seed, if you have the time and the inclination. There is quite a wonderful story—perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not—that the first successfully bred anemones in Europe in the 17th century were controlled by a mean-spirited gardener who refused to share them with anyone else. A gentleman came to call—some say a horticulturalist, some say a city official—when the seeds on the anemones were ripe. The clever visitor wore a long cloak and made sure it swept over the flower beds as he walked past. Once safely home, he removed the seeds from the hem of his coat, planted them, and nurtured them carefully. He shared with everyone.

You’ll not have to go to as much trouble to enjoy windflowers this spring. Oh, by the way—I never did learn to draw Mr. Wind properly. I still think of him when March rolls around—but now, I know that the wind doesn’t only blow in March, and it doesn’t always come from the upper left corner of life.