Repopulate the Species?

My patience has been rewarded and I found the first seedlings today of wild columbine plants I am attempting to grow from seeds I collected last fall.

Why would I do that when columbine seeds can be found in almost any display of flower garden seeds?





This post comes from a different part of my life, compared to my "observer of media and politics" posts.  But it is something that is important to me.

There are two kinds of columbine -- wild and cultivated. The cultivated kind (see the top picture left) are large and come in many different colors.  They were basically bred over the years, starting with the original wild plants.

We have some of these that grow on their own every year at our cabin in the Black Hills.  They are pretty, attractive flowers that always provide a nice splash of color in gardens.  Ours mix in nicely with other volunteer wildflowers.

But at our home on the prairie, we have wild columbine flowers that grown perennially.  My mother brought them decades ago from Colorado, where my family lived when I was born.  The wild flowers (see middle picture at left) are always red and yellow, are about half the diameter of the cultivated flowers, and are native to the mountains.

So in recent years, I have realized that this is backwards -- the wild plants that belong in the mountains being on the plains, and the cultivated and domesticated flowers at our mountain property.

So I have embarked on a project to establish some of our wild columbine at our Black Hills property. There are a native species, so there is no "invasive species" issue.

Last summer/fall, I harvested a bunch of the wild flower seeds, which are hardly larger than the head of a pin.  I froze them in the refrigerator freezer until just recently, to simulate winter.  About two weeks ago, I sowed them in a planter kit (the kind with little peat pots all connected together).

As I said, I found the first seedlings, including the one in the close-up at left.  If all goes well, we'll take them to the hills in a week or so, get them acclimated to being outside, and plant them in a likely spot.

They won't bloom the first year, but in a year or so, when their root system is well established, we should have our wild columbine.

Oh -- the title of this post, "Repopulate the Species"?  It's a Star Trek quote. Either you know what I'm talking about, or you don't.