Will butterflies visit this sea holly (Eryngium Bourgatii)

Member Name: mumsymary

Product:	Eryngium Bourgatii
Date:	10/06/09 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: attractive

Disadvantages: prickly

I treated myself to a garden plant this weekend a sea holly, Eryngium bourgatii. This is a very pretty plant with green leaves divided into spikes in a frost pattern. This mound of dark blue/green leaves have silver veins in them.
A stout branched stalk will grow up from the leaves to about 60cm. This stalk will have small dense, blue cone shaped flowers these each have a spiky silver blue rosaceous collar of leaf underneath it. These look like a thistle really. This plant is very attractive. The flowers are really a fantastic Oxford blue colour.

Eryngium bourgati is a native of Spain,, the Pyrenees and Med coast . It likes chalky sandy soil well drained soil so I hope it will like my Chiltern chalk. The best position for this plant is full sun. It is a perennial frost hardy needs little water so should be simple to look after.

I bought my plant for £5.99, from my local Wyevale garden centre, web address http://www.wyevale.co.uk You will find you can buy sea holly at many other garden centres on and off line for about the same price.

If you wanted to you could grow it from seed in autumn or spring seeds costing about £2.00. I hope mine will self seed on my chalky rockery bank, I expect I shall save a seed head and try to grow them from seed myself. This plant has a long tap root and you have to be careful and dig deep if moving this plant.

This plant is not only attractive to me but to butterflies and insects too, I shall be interested to see which species nectar on this flower this summer. It flowers June till August.
The flowers on this plant make great dried flowers for that everlasting arrangement.

Summary: A flowering plant