Teasel hedglet
This spring I noticed an abundance of teasels pushing their way up between the paving slabs where I sit in the sun to enjoy a cuppa whilst surveying the awesome garden growth and living world around me. So I looked and decided to leave them be and I have to confess a soft spot for this plant, it grows tall, has unusual spiny leaves cupped around the stems trapping pools of water and hapless insects that fall in.
The flower head is egg shaped and softly prickly, green in bud with a band of tiny flowers opening in a purple ring around the centre at first and then progressing up and down giving a longish flowering period. There’s a wonderful tactile feel to the whole thing.
The flower heads are probed by bees and butterflies, the stems crowded with sucking aphids and their predators the ladybirds, adults and nymphs feeding on the bugs, the whole plant a veritable ecosystem in itself!
I left these plants to grow and went away for some weeks on holiday. When I returned they’d reached for the sky, one and half meters tall, ox-eye daisies had joined the fun and there between the paving slabs had created a little screen growing in a straight line by my chair, a mini hedge that I enjoyed all summer long watching creatures come and go until in the autumn cutting the plants down to hang up to dry.
Teasel hedge lives on, winter decorations too!
And now the seed heads sit with me indoors over the winter reviving those summer memories and decorating my winter hearth indoors.
judy said,
July 30, 2014 at 5:42 pm
I LOVE this plant. My plant was also a “volunteer”. It is at the end of my flower bed. I almost pulled it as a weed, but something stopped me.
Every day I watch this plant as it unravels its mysteries.