Lychnis coronaria Angel's Blush - Rose campion seeds

Lychnis coronaria, or Silene coronaria (Oculata Group) ‘Angel’s Blush’, offered here in seed form, is a Rose Campion that combines silvery foliage with large white flowers featuring a pink eye. This charming variety from the Oculata Group is a short-lived perennial, often grown as a biennial. It self-seeds spontaneously here and there around the garden. A few sowings will green up poor, dry soils and romantic borders in two or three years, with no care required.

Rose Campion 'Angel’s Blush' belongs to the Caryophyllaceae family. The botanical species Silene coronaria, better known as Lychnis coronaria, is native to Eurasia (central and south-eastern Europe, northern Iran, central Asia, western Himalayas), where it grows in dry meadows, banks and rock gardens, on poor, very well-drained soils.
In the garden, the plant often behaves as a biennial: it forms a rosette in its first year, flowers the following year, then maintains itself through self-sown seedlings. The cultivar 'Angel’s Blush' belongs to the Oculata Group, which brings together forms with white flowers featuring a pink eye.
Each plant forms a soft clump, 70 to 80cm tall and 40 to 45cm wide. The leaves are oblanceolate, 5 to 10cm long, entirely covered in a fine silvery-grey down. The flowering stems are upright, more or less branched. The 3 to 4 cm diameter flowers have five rounded petals. In Angel’s Blush, the petals are white, adorned with a large soft pink to raspberry-pink eye, slightly fading towards the edge. The nectar-rich flowering spreads from June to September. The fruits are brownish capsules containing many small seeds; by leaving a few stems to dry, natural seedlings are easily obtained around the clumps. The foliage is semi-evergreen in mild climates and remains attractive outside the flowering period.

From just a few seed packets of Oculata Rose Campion 'Angel’s Blush' you can create a countryside-style border. It thrives in a dry garden, in a gravel border or on a bank. Its silvery foliage highlights warm or, conversely, pastel tones. Sow it, for example, among clumps of Verbena bonariensis, Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue' and ‘Phenomenal’ lavender. Complete with a few bright pink shrubby sage plants 'Cerro Potosi'. With very little watering, you will achieve a garden full of flowers, bees and butterflies all summer long.

Its former genus name, Lychnis, is said to come from the Greek "lychnos", meaning oil lamp; the very hairy stems and leaves were supposedly used in the past as natural wicks, once dried and impregnated with grease.