FROM EPHEMERAL spring bulbs to towering perennials with takeover tendencies, anemones are a vast family of plants offering blooms in nearly every season. With delicate blossoms held atop nodding stems, it’s easy to see how anemones earned the common name windflower. Now Swan Series anemones bring a long-blooming, carefree — you might even say “breezy,” disposition to this popular garden favorite.
Swan Series anemones are a breakthrough in hybridizing and complex anemone crosses (Anemone x hybrida and A. rupicola), producing a flowering plant with exquisite manners that blooms for a generously long season. Gone are the days of running roots and toppling stems on familiar Japanese hybrids. Plants in the new series stay where they are planted and do not require staking.
If you’ve ever wondered how new plants make their way to market, this one has a good backstory. In the early aughts, Scottish plantswoman Elizabeth MacGregor identified a single plant in a batch of anemone seedlings that was different from the others and displayed hybrid vigor, a phrase that indicates improved behavior in size, growth rate or habit when compared to its plant parents. Like all attentive nursery propagators, MacGregor set the unique plant aside to watch it grow. The lone seedling was a keeper.
After years of trialing and increasing stock through tissue culture, Anemone ‘Wild Swan’ was introduced at the Chelsea Flower Show in May 2011 where it was named Plant of the Year. The perennial was granted a U.S. Plant Patent in 2012 and was introduced to the U.S. market in 2013, where Anemone ‘Macane001’ Wild Swan was awarded Best of Show at that year’s Farwest Show in Portland. Clearly plantspeople agree ‘Wild Swan’ is special.
Wild Swan was the first but not the last in the series that today also includes Dreaming Swan and Ruffled Swan. From early summer to fall, plants in the series produce masses of purple buds on wiry stems that dance and sway above dark green, divided foliage and a clumping growth habit. Characteristic of most anemones, the buds open throughout the day, closing each evening. The large, 3- to 4-inch white flowers have frilly golden centers and showy lavender blue bands on the reverse side of the petals. Beautiful in the garden, the stems also make a graceful cut flower.
The original Anemone ‘Macane001’ Wild Swan has single white blooms and grows 16 to 24 inches tall and as wide. Anemone ‘Macane004’ Dreaming Swan has slightly larger semidouble white blooms and grows 24 to 26 inches tall. Anemone ‘Macane007’ Ruffled Swan is the tallest of the series at 30 inches with semidouble pure white flowers with ruffled margins.
Swan anemones are lovely in the woodland garden, added to mixed borders or combined with ornamental grasses in naturalistic meadow settings. Site the plants in full sun to light shade in loamy, well-drained soil and water regularly during the dry season; they are deer and rabbit resistant. Pollinators of all sorts appreciate Swan anemones’ extended bloom season, especially in late summer when most blooms are finishing, which is why all three are featured on this year’s Great Plant Picks Pollinator Paradise list at greatplantpicks.org.
Lorene Edwards Forkner is the author of “Color In and Out of the Garden.” Find her at ahandmadegarden.com and at Cultivating Color on Substack.
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