Astrantia
Astrantia major · Garden flowers
Astrantia, white form
New York Botanical Garden, 26 May 2025
Masterwort in its white form rather than the commoner pink, a faint green flush still showing along each bract's central vein. The papery collar is not the flower: it is a ring of bracts around a dome of dozens of tiny true flowers, and it lasts for weeks after they have gone over, which is why florists like it and why a border clump looks in flower for most of the summer.
Astrantia
Goodnestone, 1 June 2024
Masterwort: a papery collar of bracts around a dome of tiny true flowers, shallow enough for short-tongued visitors to get at easily. This head has one. The Latin name, Astrantia, is from the Greek for star, for the collar; the English one dates from its days as a physic-garden herb. A plant of Alpine meadows that took to English borders early and has never left them.
Astrantia with a visiting fly
Goodnestone, 1 June 2024
An astrantia with a small fly worked in among the true flowers at its centre. What reads as a single bloom is a tight cluster of tiny flowers ringed by papery pink bracts: the bracts do the advertising, and the real flowers are the modest dome in the middle, shallow enough that a short-tongued fly can drink from them. Masterwort is the old English name, from a time when it was grown as a medicinal herb rather than for the border.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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