Delphiniums should now be in all their stately glory, the 5-foot, blue spires reaching for the sky.
On one hand, the flowers are not hard to start from seed, and seedlings bloom quickly, often in their first season if started early enough. On the other hand, growing delphiniums to perfection is one barometer of a gardener’s skill.
Gardening books have all sorts of machinations for ensuring good germination from seeds. First off, fresh seed is said to be a must.
The seed also have a cold requirement before they sprout, and the suggestion usually offered is to make ice cubes with the seeds in them, then leave the cubes in the freezer for a few weeks. This seems odd because it is refrigerator temperatures, not freezer temperatures, that generally snap seeds out of dormancy. But seeds treated in this manner usually wind up in a bevy of delphinium seedlings that grow into a forest of blue spires.
But there are other requirements for success: