Do you like my carrot?

Lucky mistake? Practicing my macro settings on a lovely blue plant my wife tells me is Sea Holly I inadvertently caught in some reds from a stray nasturtium. Under inspection the first shots were promising with the crossover stems and the stamens sharp against a hedge background. As I rattled off a few more shots along came Bee Bumble and - for me - made my day!

How we got the Sea Holly is a mystery. The garden was reset from farmland many years ago and we've never planted anything like it. The sea is only a couple of miles away but I've never noticed this plant around the cliffs and there are no sand dunes for miles. Bird poo?

It's a hardy plant too. Last year it had a load of topsoil on it for about 3 weeks and seems to have thrived on it!



Sea holly is an architectural beauty of the sandy beaches and sand dunes around our shores. The plant's central cone of flowers is reminiscent of members of the daisy family, such as echinacea or rudbeckia, but sea holly is a relative of the carrot. The ruff of petals is actually a ring of spiny bracts that encircle and protect the flowers like the plates of a Stegosaurus or the frills of a Triceratops. The whole plant is a metallic blue-green, seemingly verdigrised like a bronze garden statue in miniature.