This is love-in-a-mist, an old fashioned flower properly known as Nigella damascena and I grew it from seed last year. The self-sowing promise isn't always fulfilled in my garden, but maybe I'm getting better with time and experience. Or maybe not! It's hard to know why things happen.
The love-in-a-mist came back this year in spades after a rather puny showing last year. Some nasturtium seeds I literally tossed into a bald spot in the garden have sprouted cheerfully as well. This is great news, as both provide delightful flowers and unusual foliage - the love-in-a-mist has tall feathery stems and the nasturtiums look like little lily pads. The former, as you can see, are cooling shades of blue and white, the latter warm yellows and oranges.
Nigella comes from niger, or the Latin for black, because the seeds are black. And get this - in Egypt, ladies used to eat the seeds to "produce stoutness, which is considered an attribute to beauty in these lands," according to a handy/dandy reference book on my desk called "100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names" by Diana Wells. The heck with handy/dandy. That's some attribute!
In any event, I love these flowers and their flighty foliage. Something about them suggests airy thoughts. They're in the back of my vegetable patch, a place increasingly inhabited by flowers. I like the idea of combining the two and lots of gardeners I've interviewed suggest this either to create a more colorful bed or to distract little nasties that otherwise would be feeding on your vegetables. It helps soften the look, too, when the lettuce is pulverized and the tomato plants yellow.
So far, the tomatoes are looking good. Maybe it's all that misty love. Maybe it's the goodwill it generates.
