Cute Summer Man - Clarkia

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

A beautiful plant for flower beds, rabatok and for landscaping balconies

Flowers in the garden are different. There are amazingly beautiful and luxurious ones. They are modest or pretty, smart or just beautiful. Among them, clarkia refers to flowers that could be called cute, pretty, discreet.

The cuteness of its flowers is revealed on close examination. Imagine a bush-bunch of erect, thin, strong stems, height, depending on the variety, from 30 to 90 cm. The leaves are unpretentious, elongated-oval. But in the axils of these small leaves there are lovely flowers - white or pink, crimson, red or purple, as well as salmon, lilac. Clarkia is a fragrant plant, it is a good honey plant.

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The flowers are small - up to 3-4 cm in diameter. They can be simple or double, like small roses, and therefore charming. For this, many growers love clarkia. She is modestly good in group plantings, in flower beds, in beds of annuals. It is also sown in Moorish lawns. Looks great on the balcony. It is also suitable for cutting, bouquets. It costs a long time in the cut.

Clarkia is an annual plant of the fireweed family, to which the well-known Ivan tea belongs. Homeland - North America, found in Chile. The plant feels great in our climate. Blooms profusely from July to September.

Types of clarkia

There are about 30 known species of clarkia. In floriculture, two types are used - graceful and pretty.

Clarkia graceful, she is Clarkia unduiculata (Clarkia elegans) - a slender, elegant plant, forms a branchy bush of a pyramidal shape up to 90 cm high. The leaves are dark green in color. Clarkia pretty (Clarkia pulcbella) forms a branched oval bush 40-50 cm high.

Flowers are small, simple, their color is often lilac. The flower petals are larger than those of the graceful clarkia, and their forms are more varied, for example, serrated, ciliated, etc. The leaves are gray-green. Plants of this species bloom 10-12 days earlier than graceful clarkia.

On sale are mainly grades of graceful clarkia. Among them the following are good. Dorothy - pink flowers; Sharlakhovaya - scarlet-red double flowers; Pink - the flowers are pale pink; Albatross - double white flowers; Salmon Perfection - double flowers, pink; Purpurköning - densely double crimson flowers; Gloriosa - flowers are very large, double, scarlet tone; Feuergarbe - double flowers, orange-scarlet.

One of the best varieties - Brilliant - flowers are very large, densely double, bright pink, inflorescences are long, wide.

Also noteworthy are varieties of domestic breeding with double flowers: Joy - with salmon-pink flowers and Khavskoe Solnyshko - has pink-crimson flowers. Variety Fantazia, 69-75 cm high, has bright double flowers. The Russian size series presents an unusual clarkia: plants up to 90 cm high with large (5-6 cm) double flowers of various shades of pink. This clarkia especially needs good nutrition, the plants must be grown at a distance of 40-50 cm from each other. It blooms two weeks later than the rest of the graceful clarkia varieties, but continues until autumn.

What Clarkia Loves

The soils are slightly acidic, poorly nutritious, but not lean. On very fertile soils, the bushes grow green to the detriment of flowering, plants are more susceptible to diseases. Plants have a very negative attitude to fresh organic fertilization.

Illumination. Clarkia is light-requiring. Only transfers slight shading. It should be planted in the brightest places, but care must be taken that the roots do not overheat in the sun.

Moisture. Plants cannot tolerate dry soils. In this case, they require watering. But they also don't like excess moisture, especially in hot weather: their roots get sick with fungal diseases, and the plants die.

Temperature. Clarkia is a cold-resistant plant. Adult bushes can withstand frosts down to -3oС degrees. In hot weather, the bushes quickly fade. Therefore, in a hot sunny summer in a light partial shade, clarkia turns out better than in full sun.

Clarkia cultivation

This plant is grown by sowing seeds. The seeds are very small: 1 g contains up to 4000 seeds. The experience of professionals has shown that it takes about 0.2 g of seeds to get 100 plants. They can be sown directly into the ground, or clarke can be grown through seedlings.

Seeds are sown into the ground in the spring as soon as the soil warms up. This usually happens in late April - early May. Later planting dates give worse results, mainly for two reasons. First, clarkia develops better in cool weather - it is + 13 … + 17 ° С. Secondly, later a flea usually appears - a lover of eating young shoots of clarkia. With earlier sowing, the seedlings have time to get stronger before the appearance of this flea and become "too tough for her".

When grown on the balcony, clarke can be sown as early as mid-April. At the same time, you can sow seeds for seedlings in the greenhouse. Since its seeds are very small, it is convenient to sow them in a shallow groove, barely sprinkled with sifted earth. Seedlings appear together in 10-12 days. Since seedlings, like adult plants, suffer greatly from a lack of light, seedlings must be thinned out as early as possible so that they do not shade each other.

It is best to do this at the stage of 3-4 real leaves. Leave between the plants 15-20 cm, in the tallest varieties - 25 cm. If thinning is not done, the plants stretch, do not branch and quickly fade, i.e. they do not like the neighborhood of their relatives. In order not to bother with thinning for a long time, it is easier to sow seeds in nests of 3-5 pieces with a distance between the nests of 20-25 cm. Then you can remove excess shoots, leaving one of the strongest plants in the nest. Experience has shown that less care is required in this case.

When growing for seedlings, you need to take into account that Clarkia does not like transplants very much, and withstands this procedure only at a very young age. Transplanting seedlings from a greenhouse into open ground is usually carried out at the end of May with a lump of moist earth. So they take root easier. The seedlings are pre-hardened, accustoming them not only to open air, but also to the open sun, so that they do not get an ultraviolet burn. Seasoned seedlings can withstand light night frosts.

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Clarkia care

It consists in watering during dry weather, in feeding and the formation of clarkia bushes. Good results are obtained by feeding once a week with complex fertilizer with approximately the same nitrogen and potassium content. Top dressing, as expected, needs to be done after watering. For abundant flowering, it is recommended to carry them out before budding.

It is very important to pinch the tops of young clarkia plants when they reach a height of 12 cm. After such an operation, the bushes begin to actively branch, they turn out to be compact and are completely covered with flowers.

At the beginning of July and often even at the end of June, clarkia plants bloom and bloom all summer until the end of August. They give seeds. If desired, they can be sown before winter.

Lyubov Bobrovskaya

Photo by Natalia Butyagina