Gadenin日本語Get the appSpring, on last year's plants, for four to six weeks
Flowering starts in early spring as soon as the soil warms and days lengthen, runs through mid spring at its peak, and finishes as the weather turns properly warm. Four to six weeks is normal in a cool spring; a warm one can compress it to three. The display comes entirely from rosettes that grew the previous summer and autumn, and the size of those rosettes going into winter decides the size of the display. There is no way to extend flowering at the far end, because the plant is a biennial and dies once it has set seed.
The flowers open a few at a time from the tip of a stem that is tightly coiled like a fiddlehead or a shepherd's crook. The coil unrolls as it flowers, so at any moment there are open flowers at the base of the curl, buds in the middle and the tight spiral still to come at the tip. That is why the display lasts so much longer than the life of any individual flower, and it is also how you judge how much flowering is left: a stem still showing a tight coil at the tip has a fortnight or more to run.
| Stage | What you see | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Buds forming | Stems lengthening, tips tightly coiled, no color | Nothing; do not feed |
| First open flowers | Color at the base of each coil | Note the date, it is your annual marker |
| Full flush | Sheet of color, coils half unrolled | Enjoy it; keep water off the leaves |
| Going over | Coils nearly straight, color fading, lower leaves graying | Decide now which plants to leave for seed |
| Setting seed | Stems straight, tiny green nutlets along them | Pull everything you are not keeping |
The color changes as each flower ages
Individual flowers open with a yellow or pale eye at the center and the eye darkens to a ring as the flower ages and is pollinated. On many plants the petals themselves shift from pink in bud to blue when open, which is why a patch in full flower looks faintly two-toned at close range even though it reads as pure blue from across the garden. This is normal ageing and not a sign of a problem, a soil deficiency or a mixture of different plants.
The blue is genuinely blue rather than the violet that most garden flowers offer, which is why it works so well with the yellows and whites of spring bulbs. White and pink forms exist and behave identically in every practical respect. If a colony that started blue drifts towards pink and white over several years, that is simple genetics reasserting itself in self-sown seedlings; pulling the off-color plants before they seed is the only way to hold a color.
Why a plant does not flower
Almost every case of a forget-me-not that refuses to flower comes down to timing rather than culture. A plant sown in autumn goes into winter as a tiny seedling, spends the following spring making the rosette it should have made the previous year, and flowers a full twelve months later than expected. From the plant's point of view nothing has gone wrong; it is simply a year behind. The same happens to seedlings that germinate late in a self-sown colony, which is why a patch usually contains both flowering plants and non-flowering rosettes at the same time.
The second cause is a plant that has been moved. Forget-me-not transplants easily as a small rosette in autumn but resents being lifted once the flower stems have started to extend, and a spring transplant frequently sulks, flowers thinly and dies without setting much seed. Move rosettes in autumn or leave them where they are. The third cause, much rarer, is deep shade under evergreens: the plant tolerates shade from deciduous shrubs because it flowers before their leaves are out, but a position that is dark all year gives leaves and no flower.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy rosette, no stems at all | Sown too late last year, still first-year | Wait; it flowers next spring |
| Thin stems, few flowers | Overcrowded, or moved in spring | Thin rosettes to 6 in (15 cm) in autumn |
| Tall, floppy, leafy, sparse flower | Too much nitrogen | Stop feeding; the patch corrects itself next year |
| Leaves only, year after year | Evergreen shade or dense root competition | Move the colony to deciduous shade or open ground |
| Flowers open then collapse quickly | Warm dry spring | Water at the roots; accept a shorter season |
Do not dig up a non-flowering rosette to check the roots. It is almost certainly a first-year plant doing exactly what it should, and lifting it in spring is the one thing that will genuinely stop it flowering.
Flowering under bulbs, and what follows
The reason forget-me-not is planted at all in most gardens is that it flowers at exactly the moment tulips and daffodils are up, and it covers the bare soil and the bulbs' scruffy lower foliage with a low haze that makes the bulb stems look deliberate. Getting that right is a matter of density rather than anything clever: rosettes at six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) apart close into a continuous sheet by flowering time, while a scatter of individual plants reads as weeds among the bulbs.
When the display ends, the two plants finish together, and that is convenient. Pull the forget-me-nots as they go over and the bulb foliage is left standing to die down on its own with air around it, which it needs. Leaving the forget-me-nots in place instead smothers the ripening bulb leaves under a mat of graying, mildewed foliage and weakens the bulbs for the following year. This is a practical argument for pulling, quite separate from controlling the seeding.
Write down the first flower and the last
Two dates each spring are worth recording: the day the first flower opens and the day you judge the patch has gone over. Together they tell you how long the display actually lasts in your garden, which is usually longer than people remember, and they give you the deadline for pulling. Add a note of where the best color was, because in a self-sown colony the strongest patch moves around from year to year and following it is how you decide where to let seed fall.
It is also worth noting which plants flowered and which stayed as rosettes, with a rough count. A colony that is half first-year rosettes has a good display coming next spring even if this year looked thin, and knowing that stops you sowing more seed you do not need.