At this time of year flowers that second bloom on a cold windy day are very welcome. This at least has the merit of being blue and is a rather nice small flowered hybrid clematis.

The Meconopsis Group met at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh yesterday. Dr. Chris Grey Wilson gave two talks based round his latest monograph on Meconopsis which has just been published. There are  new species being described as well as re- appraisals of current species particularly those based about Meconopsis 'horridula'  David and Margaret Thorn and David Rankin also made presentations. More on this when I have the minutes.

One of the wonderful things about writing this website is the generous friends one meets. This is a quite wonderful semi - double form of Glaucidium palmatum from Tetsuo in Japan. This is a photograph of a photograph so the resolution has suffered but I very much look forward to growing the seeds on that he also most generously sent. His advice was about half will germinate in 2015 and the rest in 2016. Having said that I always keep seed pots for 3 years as a policy. 

This is very much the time of year when all sorts of organizations collect in seed from donors  - often from all over the world. The seed needs to be cleaned to remove any rubbish - fragments of seed pods, non viable seeds and then dried. It then should be carefully labelled and packaged and sent off to the Seed Manager. The seed is then checked and if there are queries they may contact you. Depending on how many people send in a particular  variety and how rare it is they package it into individual seed packets with either a very few seeds for rare plants or things of high demand. This seed  is then added to a seed list which is published and sent to all the members of the particular organisation. Members then choose a particular allocation of packets and eventually these are sent out in time to sow in spring. The Meconopsis Seed Group does this, so does the Scottish Rock Garden Club and the Alpine Garden Society. Many members will be involved in the packaging but the really big job is that of the Seed Exchange Managers who overall supervise and make the allocations. We all need to be very grateful for this dedication. 

This has been a remarkable autumn for late or second flowering. I have always thought very highly of blue flowers which is I suspect why I was so attracted to Meconopsis. Some of those above are a deep true blue but many show just hint of purple. The Corydalis - a hybrid in my garden but derived from C. cashmeriana, the Ceonothus, the skullcap (this is a wonderful blue and was bought as an annual and grown from seed but has been perennial some some years - Salvia but not sure of species) and the Delphinium are blue as is the annual Lobelia but the Clematis heraclefolia, lavender, geranium and Veronica all have a touch of red which gives them a purple hue.