Flowers can be arranged on the stem in several ways. We commonly think of single flowers, such as a single-stem rose, but many flowers are compound. Flower heads of a few to thousands of flowers grow next to each other and may look like a single flower, with each flower called a floret. The aster, daisy, and sunflower families, plus many other families, have flower heads. The individual flowers in a compound flower head may start producing seeds as they are pollinated and are not officially blooming anymore, but the whole head still looks like it is blooming for a longer time.
Most plants have a structure of flower parts called the inflorescence. The pedicle is the stem that attaches an individual flower to the plant stem. It can be short or long and can arrange the flowers into round or flat-topped clusters. Some inflorescences cause the stem to stop with flowers at the end and are determinate, and some have flowers continuing to arrive over time and are indeterminate.
Examples of inflorescences are corymbs, cymes, panicles, racemes, spadices, spikes, and umbels. There are compound versions of these and other kinds of inflorescences. Knowing which inflorescence is which is important when you are trying to identify plants. Each individual flower in one of these structures may last a day or longer. The overall effect is that the plant blooms from the time the first flower opens until the last flower in the inflorescence finishes blooming.
If a columbine is planted from seeds in the spring, it will not bloom. If the seeds are planted in the late summer or early fall, they will probably bloom the following spring. If the plant is purchased in a pot in the spring, it will probably bloom in the spring.
A single columbine plant will produce flowers on a multibranched panicle over several weeks. From the first to last flower, it will bloom for about a month. The plant tag is designed to give you the range of months during which the plant will bloom. It will not bloom for the entire range. In fact, if you are in the southern states, columbines may begin blooming in April. And, if you are in a high Rocky Mountain valley, they may not bloom until August.
If you pinch off the flowers as they begin to fade, the plant may produce a few more flowers for a longer blooming season. On the other hand, many columbine species are short-lived perennials that stay in the garden for many years because they produce seeds that continually replace the plant. Pinching off fading flowers will reduce the amount of seeds produced.
Keep your plant healthy, and it will grow larger. It will have more flowers over a longer time than it did this year. Be careful when you read plant tags, as they may not mean what you think they do.
