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History and Origins
The delphinium is revered as the queen of the border. She wears her gracefully spiralling robes in shades of blue, purple, mauve and white with an awesome elegance. What she lacks in perfume, she more than makes up for with the dark charms of her eyes, or bees. |
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 In Afghanistan, she is known as salil and her yellow dye is used to colour silks and wools. In Greek, delphinium means 'little dolphin' - which the unfurled leaf and bud resembles. Although the plant is poisonous, its seeds were once believed to be medicinal and they stupified scorpions.
A plant resembling our modern delphinium was known at the beginning of the fifteenth century. But the ancestry of today's plant is lost in the mists of hybridisation and hearsay.
The delphinium family, whose roots join with the buttercup and the aconitum, consists of some 350 species of hardy and half hardy annuals and herbaceous perennials that are often short lived. The annuals include those favourite, old cottage garden larkspurs which, in recent years, have been 'improved' away from their gentle blues into double flowered specimens in white, pink, lavender and violet standing three feet (90cm) tall. Thus, it has become a bedding plant. |
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 The species delphinium bear little resemblance to the lofty towers that dominate our borders. Their flowers are often borne along arching stems in panicles or racemes in red (D. cardinale and D. nudicaule), blue (D. ajacis, D. grandiflorum and D. taisisnense) or yellow (D. zalil). Their heights range between eight inches (20cm) and six feet (1,8m). Although these are usually offered as seed, there are a few nurseries who sell young plants by mail order. The open habit of these species render them less popular as garden plants.
There is, however, a romance in the story of the evolution of the modern delphinium. It is a tale of diligence, patience and selfless devotion by a band of enthusiasts. These were the breeders, the hybridists, those who hand pollinated and line bred, crossing and crossing again the best of one with the finest of another, always attempting to improve the delphinium in the truth of its colour, its general constitution and disease resistance. Most of this pioneering work was earned out from the mid-nineteenth century. |
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 In the early 20th century, a Czech immigrant, Frank Reinelt, once head gardener to Queen Marie of Romania, settled in California and started a nursery where, for more than 40 years, he worked on hybridising new delphiniums from crosses between D. elatum and D. grandiflorum. He developed the now famous Pacific Giant hybrids in the 1930s and, by 1967, was offering twelve groups of plants with names taken from Tennyson's The Idylls of the King, based on the legendary court of King Arthur.
The names have percolated through the years and remain with us still. There is the Astolat group which are lilac pink, 'Black Knight', a dramatic deep purple with a black eye, 'Blue Bird' with clear blue flowers with white eyes, and 'Guinevere' with pale blue pink flowers, also with a white eye. In due course, some seeds of Remelt's cultivars made their way to England, from whence some of the original D. elatum seed originated.
Also from the turn of the century, the most-celebrated English breeders of delphiniums - Blackmore and Langdon of Bristol and Frank Bishop - began to develop new races of delphiniums, incorporating the American seed as part parents.
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