Columbine (Aquilegia) is a perennial with nodding flowers and long spurs that opens in late spring and early summer. It wants partial shade and soil that holds moisture, and once it stands in the right place it largely looks after itself. The difficulty lies in the seed, which needs a cold period before it will germinate.
How to sow columbine
Columbine seed has a dormancy that is broken by cold and damp. Seed of Aquilegia canadensis needs around 60 days cold and moist, and the same principle applies to the garden columbines. Give the seed the cold instead of working around it.
Winter sowing from January to March: Scatter the seed thinly in moist seed compost and cover with no more than 2-3 mm of soil. Stand the sowing outdoors in shade, ideally against a north facing wall. Germination comes when the soil temperature rises above 5 degrees, usually in April or May. The whole method is covered in the article on winter sowing.
Autumn sowing from August to September: Sow straight where the plants are to grow, or in trays left standing outside. The seed lies in the soil all winter and germinates early in spring, exactly as columbine does on its own.
The fridge as a fallback: If you missed the winter sowing, mix the seed with lightly damp sand in a bag and keep it in the fridge for 30 to 60 days at 2 to 5 degrees. Then sow in pots indoors at 15 to 18 degrees.
Columbine rarely flowers in the same year you sow. Count on flowers the second year, sometimes not until the third. Seed that takes this treatment is gathered in the seeds for winter sowing category.
Why spring sowing indoors fails
The advice to sow on a windowsill in March works badly for columbine in particular. Without cold beforehand the seed germinates unevenly and slowly, sometimes only after several months, and a whole packet gives a handful of seedlings. The conclusion is usually that the seed was too old. Most of the time it was not. It had simply never had a winter.
Position, soil and spacing
Columbine belongs in partial shade, at the edge of a shrub planting or under deciduous trees where it gets morning sun and shade in the middle of the day. The soil should hold moisture but drain freely. Wet, compacted ground is the one situation columbine cannot handle, because the crown rots there. Work compost in before planting and set the plants 30 to 40 cm apart. Columbine forms a deep taproot and wants to stay where you put it, so move it while it is small. Mature plants reach 20 to 90 cm depending on the species.
Species to choose between
Most seed packets contain crosses between several species. Once you know the species you understand better what you are getting.
| Species | Height | Flower colour | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aquilegia vulgaris | 50-80 cm | Blue violet, also pink and white | The columbine that has naturalised across much of Britain and northern Europe. Short, hooked spurs. Flowers from May to July and self seeds readily. |
| Aquilegia caerulea | 30-60 cm | Violet blue with white | Flowers 5 to 7 cm across with long, straight spurs. Clearly two toned and wants evenly moist soil. |
| Aquilegia chrysantha | 60-90 cm | Yellow | The flowers stand upright instead of nodding, with long spurs pointing backwards. The species that takes the most sun. |
| Aquilegia canadensis | 30-90 cm | Red with yellow | Narrow, hanging bells. Resistant to leaf miner and good in partial shade. |
| Aquilegia flabellata | 20-45 cm | Pale blue lilac with cream white tips | Low and compact with hooked spurs. Suits a border edge and a pot. Comes from Japan and East Asia. |
How to keep one variety true
Columbine crosses freely, both between varieties and between species. The flowers are pollinated by bumblebees and other long tongued bees, and a bumblebee covers several hundred metres without effort. If you have two varieties in the same garden, the seed you collect is a mixture, and the plants that come up rarely look like the parent. A white variety gives blue lilac offspring. This is the most common disappointment with columbine, and it can be controlled:
Grow a single variety: The simplest route if you care about the colour. Distance rarely does the job, since bumblebees fly further than the garden is wide.
Cut the seed heads off the rest: Remove the seed heads from everything except your favourite and no mixed plants spread through the border. The seed you collect can still be crossed, because the pollen has already moved.
A bag over the buds: If you want seed that comes true, put a fine mesh bag over a few buds before they open and pollinate by hand with a brush. The bag stays on until the petals have dropped.
Cuttings for named varieties: A named variety cannot be propagated from seed. Take basal cuttings in early summer instead, and the plant will be identical to the mother plant.
The free crossing is the price for columbine being one of the earliest flowers in the border for bumblebees. You will find more of them among seeds for pollinators.
A short lived perennial that lives on through seed
A single columbine plant rarely grows old. Count on three to four years, sometimes only two, before it fades away. That is normal and not a growing mistake. The stand still carries on, because self sown seedlings fill in from below. You will recognise the same pattern from lupin.
It changes how you look after the stand. Let a few seed heads ripen fully every summer so the gaps are filled, and sow a fresh batch of seed every other year if you want to decide where the plants end up. Seedlings that land in the wrong place are moved in the spring when they have two or three true leaves, while the taproot is still short. More long lived choices for the border are covered in the article on perennials.
Care during and after flowering
Watering: Keep the soil evenly moist from May through July. If the plant dries out during flowering, buds drop and the leaves yellow early.
Feeding: One dressing of compost in spring is enough. A lot of nitrogen gives soft leaves that are more prone to disease.
Cutting back: When flowering is over in late July, cut the whole plant down, flower stems and leaves, to about 5 cm above the ground and water it well. Within three to four weeks a fresh, healthy set of leaves appears that holds until the frosts.
Seed heads: If you want to collect seed, leave the capsules until they turn brown and split open at the top. The seeds are black and glossy. Harvest over a bowl, because they jump away easily.
Aquilegia sawfly and mildew
Aquilegia sawfly (Pristiphora rufipes) is the most common attack. The larvae are pale green, up to 1 cm long and have a yellow brown head. They sit on the underside of the leaf and eat from the edge inwards, and a heavy attack takes the whole canopy of leaves in a few days. The sawfly is active from May to September in two generations. Turn the leaves over once a week from mid May and pick the larvae off by hand. The plant normally survives even complete defoliation.
Powdery mildew settles as a grey white coating on the leaves in dry late summers and is mostly a cosmetic fault. More serious is downy mildew (Peronospora aquilegiicola), which gives angular yellow or purple patches with a white lilac coating on the underside of the leaf, most often in spring and autumn. Affected plants are dug up and thrown out, not on the compost heap. Do not put a new columbine in the same spot for the next year, keep the plants spaced apart and go easy on the nitrogen.
Poisonous in every part
Every part of columbine counts as mildly poisonous, and the seeds are the part singled out in the literature. Confirmed poisonings are rare, but the plant should not be eaten and it does not belong in a children's growing bed. The sap can irritate the skin, so wear gloves when you cut the plant back. The toxicity has one advantage: deer and rabbits are reluctant to graze columbine, unlike many other plants in the border. More varieties to sow are found among flower seeds.
Author: Emma Vogiatzi
Fact-checked by Erik Hoekstra
Last updated 2026-09-01