Blue Lace Flower

This flower, also known as didiscus or trachymene, deserves the lovely name of 'blue lace flower', with its pale blue colour and miniature individual flowers gathered on an umbel.  It is a half hardy annual and it is meant to have a delicate fragrance, but I must say I have not detected much of a scent on mine this year.  Last year only a few of my plants survived as they were obviously yet another fav of the rabbits who reduced my seemingly healthy furry stemmed plants, into stumps overnight.  This year the plants have been glorious. 

Although, you are best off cutting them continually to encourage further flowers, I like to leave one or two plants to go through the full process of opening, right through to seed stage as the flowers take on different 'personas' at each stage.  So here are some photos of these little beauties from my cutting garden.

The umbel is just half open, you can see the centre flowers just unfurling.

Completely open and it then forms a lovely dome shape.

After the individual flowers have died back leaving this gorgeous starburst shape like a firework.

Starting to close up with the beautiful pale pink opaque seeds just showing at the tip of each stem.

Getting tighter!

The following pictures show an example of each stage of the flower from bud through to seed, albeit slightly blurred, taken this morning in the glorious early morning dew at around 7am as the sun peeked out between the clouds.