Aconitum ‘Spark’s Variety’

Aconitum 'Spark's Variety'

This was bought from Beth Chatto’s nursery in March 2011. I love the deeply dissected leaves. It should grow into a wonderful tall mass of luscious foliage topped with deep blue flower spikes in summer. I am hoping it will contrast beautifully with the Miscanthus sinensis 'Kleine Fontäne' alongside, replacing the Veronicastrum that I had to move.

15 Comments


  1. You are so organised with this page. What a great resorce. I have a database I use for my clients and was thinking of starting a spread sheet with plants in my garden, but I think that might be a future project. this looks a lovely plant I look forward to seeing the flowers.


    1. (meant to reply to your comment but didn’t, half asleep, so this is me trying to fix it…)
      Hi Christina. Its actually taken me months to go from having the idea to getting it working, I never seem to get time to tweak my own site, too busy working on other people’s sites! And it still is working properly, since I intend to do the occasional mammoth update I don’t want the posts to pop up in my feed, but that is proving problematic at present…

      I am really looking forward to this flowering, I just hope it will be happy enough, there are tree roots around, but I dug in lots of fresh compost. We’ll see!


  2. Hi Christina. Its actually taken me months to go from having the idea to getting it working, I never seem to get time to tweak my own site, too busy working on other people’s sites! And it still is working properly, since I intend to do the occasional mammoth update I don’t want the posts to pop up in my feed, but that is proving problematic at present…

    I am really looking forward to this flowering, I just hope it will be happy enough, there are tree roots around, but I dug in lots of fresh compost. We’ll see!


  3. That’s a lovely looking plant Janet! Forget the flowers, hehe! I prefer it for its foliage :)


    1. Well, I won’t entirely forget the flowers, but I agree, the foliage alone makes it a great plant.


  4. For some reason my computer isn’t loading your photo. I can see it in the thumbnail on the Google Reader page. What a nice contrast to a Miscanthus, it will be a great companion.


    1. Hello Janet, wonder why that is – hope it isn’t due to all the fiddling around I’ve been doing on the blog lately. This post isn’t even supposed to appear in the feed! Yes, I am looking forward to seeing it alongside the miscanthus, one of the reasons I chose it was to get a similar effect to when I had the Veronicastrum there, which of course wasn’t happy at all. I hope the aconitum fares better…


  5. Like the foilage and I am very impressed in your organised post and how helpful that will be to you in the future. I would say I might copy the idea but I know it will be a waste of time as it just wont happen:)


    1. Well, give that I started on this back in November, and still only have 11 plants documented, I think it might be a good idea with a major “but” attached!


    1. Bummer! Wonder why that is…


  6. I have a couple of hybrid aconites, but the ones that do best for me were dug from the woods at a garden friend’s house – that luscious purplish blue at the end of summer is just wonderful, but planted out of range of the dogs: poisonous in all parts, as they say :) Good luck with yours from la Chatto’s!


    1. Thanks Cyndy, its moisture retention I am most concerned about, thre are a few tree roots around and if we have another long dry spell I will have to break my own rules and keep it watered to allow it to get well established. Having a friend with a wood sounds ideal – wonder where I can get me one of those ;-)


  7. I see you have it planted in pebbles. Is it one of several plants in a rock garden or are the pebbles a light mulch?


    1. Pebbles are just a light mulch, means I don’t have to stare at a large area of bare earth from the house for 3 months of the year…

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