Cupped by bristly sepals, the five-petalled flowers of phacelia flare open at the tips, drawing insects to their abundant nectar and blue pollen. Hoverflies, honeybees, parasitic wasps, solitary bees and bumblebees – there’s life all around the observer while hunkering down among the plants.
Phacelia in the garden
The writer always has a ready packet of Phacelia tanacetifolia and uses it for sowing into any bare soil among both vegetables and ornamentals. In early May, part of the flower garden was rejigged to curtail the spread of some vigorous Michaelmas daisies, leaving a space to plant biennial cotton thistles, the giant Onopordum acanthium, which will tower above the head next summer.
To stop weeds germinating in the temporarily cleared ground, phacelia was sown, and its softly mauve flowers have become a watercolour wash of colour at mid‑height in the border.
Cover crop benefits
Grown by farmers as a cover crop, phacelia grows fast, suppressing weeds, capturing nutrients, improving drainage and conditioning the soil. At field scale, it is an eye-soothing haze of purple with a high nectar yield, supporting millions of insect lives. In gardens, it is direct-sown as a green manure plant, cut down while still green and dug into the vegetable garden.
Intricate details
Looked at closely, phacelia has a rhythmic structure, each flower opening in sequence along a coiled scroll like the headstock of a violin; its common name is fiddlehead. Through the act of drawing, the writer notices details: the way the amethyst stamens explode out of the flowers, that every stem is covered in hairs, the lines of maturing seedpods stacked along the stem like an ear of wheat.
The form of this arrangement is most strikingly shown in a 1928 photograph by Karl Blossfeldt, whose work revealed with extraordinary precision the patterns and symmetry of plants. The unfurling of ferns, the uncoiling of comfrey and the elegant curls of phacelia are revealed with startling clarity in his black and white images. It is a plant that inspires art, nurtures the soil, adds colour to borders and fills the air with pollinating insects.
