Scabiosa: Flower Spotlight
This article comes from our series of flower spotlights, which are adaptations of the newsletters we send to members of our flower share throughout the season. You can see more spotlights by heading here.
Scabiosa atropurpurea, AKA Pincushion Flower
Beautiful scabiosa floating and flying out over this arrangement and its somwhat risqué mug.
Scabiosa has an unfortunate name, but it's a glorious flower. It sits like a little mushroom atop swaying, wiry stems, with many adorable button-shaped side buds accompanying it. The flowers themselves are compound, like a sunflower or daisy, but when the central florets open, they add the magic of contrasting colors with their wiggling little anthers, which are usually white. On the dark red, almost black varieties, the anthers add something extremely special. In bouquets, I often let scabiosa hang out in front of or above everyone else, because it's the perfect flower to add whimsy, gesture, and movement to a bouquet. Its intricacy continues to intrigue me all these years after I first grew it.
We plant scabiosa early in the season, around February in the greenhouse, since it's a cool annual and can handle plenty of frost. It goes outside around equinox, or March 20th. We usually plant a second succession, because the plants start to get wild and unruly and go to seed before we're quite done with them. In 2022, like many of our annuals, our scabiosa succession was decimated by fungus gnats, and we simply didn't have more. We still got by, albeit with a bit less flair.
The unfortunate scientific genus name is, in fact, related to the word scabies, which is an itchy skin condition caused by mites — BUT scabiosa was used to treat the itch, and didn't cause it, or look like it. Phew! Atropurpurea, as we've learned before, simply means "purple".
Scabiosa's other common names include mourningbride and mournful widow, both of which refer to the very dark, almost black color of some varieties — a beautiful maiden dressed in black, mourning her husband's passing. In 1697, William Congreve published a play called The Mourning Bride, which as far as I can tell has nothing to do with the flower, but the drawing for the costume for the main character I found does call to mind the rigid and yet billowing flowers.
The black variety I grow is called Black Knight, and it is among the most productive. The whites and yellows tend to be less vigorous, perhaps because they have been bred so far away from their natural, dark strength.
May there be beauty, and not mourning, in your life, today and always.
A costume for Zara, the main character in William Congreve’s play The Mourning Bride.