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Wort is an old English word for a plant and this plant gets the other part of its common name from its ability to produce copious quantities of honey nectar.
In fact, some people grow this plant for its value for bees and other pollinating insects. It seems to be particularly popular with bumble bees, which busily buzz their way around the flowers loading up with energy-rich sugary liquid.
The fact honeywort is popular with bees and other insects is not surprising because it is a member of the borage family.
Other members include echiums, comfrey and pulmonaria, and all are constantly visited by nectar-seeking bees.
Colour
But honeywort is not just grown as an early-season nectar source. It is primarily grown for its flowers and coloured leaves at the tip.
The leaves are of a glaucous blue-green, the blue being more pronounced on some plants and in some selections of seed.
In that case, the seed companies have chosen the more darkly shaded plants, and some of them are dark violet-blue and even purple-tinged.
These are the most widely grown in gardens. The flowers themselves are relatively small tubes of blue-purple and most of the colour is provided by other flower parts, such as sepals and the top leaves.
The flowers are grouped in a cluster and are usually nodding in attractive fashion.
The full botanical name of the blue-purple form is Cerinthe major, Purpurascens. Cerinthe is derived from the Greek words for wax and flower, anthos being a flower, and it is an apt description of the flowers and the whole plant, because it has a slightly succulent look about it.
Even the leaves of young seedlings have a waxiness and thickened appearance.
Annual
Honeywort is an annual flower from southern Europe, the plants withering and dying off after shedding seed.
The seed is viable and the plant survives cold weather, cerinthe being a hardy annual, although it can be caught by a hard, late spring frost when it has made fresh growth and flowering has commenced, but the same applies to many other kinds of plants and does not happen very often.
Honeywort can be sown in spring or autumn and seeds can be sown now to flower in about three months.
The seeds can be sown directly into the ground where they are to grow, just digging the soil over lightly and making it reasonably fine.
The seeds can be sown in small groups, about 15cm apart, and can be thinned if too crowded.
Or the plants can be raised in pots, trays or cell-trays and planted out in the soil when they are about 5-8cm tall, about 15-20cm apart.
Sow or plant a fair-sized group, as single plants look a bit lost on their own, unless some single plants are positioned as outliers from a bigger group.
Make sure to keep the plants free from weeds by hoeing as soon as weed seedlings appear.
The good thing about honeywort is that sown once it goes on self-sowing for many years, often popping up in unexpected places.
It looks well at the front of a border as it is not tall, reaching about 50cm in good ground, and it associates nicely with rock or gravel.
It is a sunshine flower and looks best when the sun is shining, as it is dark-coloured. Some people grow it mixed through California poppy, another reliable self-sower that is not a nuisance by seeding too much. The dark blue honeywort and the orange poppies make a strong combination.
Primroses have been very good this spring, a bit delayed by cold weather initially – especially the wild ones of banks and hedgerows – but they had great reserves of energy due to moist weather last summer.
Primroses can last for years, but the plants can get tired sometimes and go into decline if, for example, they are getting too much competition.
If you want to improve flowering – or just to increase numbers of plants – though not taken from the countryside, this can be done as soon as the flowers are past their best.
After flowering, primroses go into a vegetative growth phase, the leaves elongating to catch more light and new roots forming. By mid-summer, the leaves turn yellow and wither away, ready to flower next spring.
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