Lobelia Queen Victoria // Cardinal Flower

Hi everyone, it's Jeanette here from Enthusiastic Gardener. What I've tended to do in the past is as soon as there's the hint of spring I rush out to the garden centre, I fill my garden up with beautiful things for spring so it looks very colourful and then by autumn I haven't got so much beautiful colours so that's what I'm trying to correct. So I've been to the garden centre and I've bought a few plants with late summer and autumn colours so hopefully I can continue the colours through the season right to the very end. Now I have found this beautiful plant here which is in fact a lobelia, it's called a lobelia queen victoria. Now you normally associate lobelias with the carpet covering plants which are ideal for hanging baskets and ground cover but there are actually 415 different species of lobelia, they come in small, large, hardy, tender, annuals, perennials, shrubs, so they're an amazing species. Whichever type of lobelia you have they do have some things that are common to them all, they all have alternate leaves, all the flowers have five lobes and they all have such vibrant colours and I have found some amazing information about this type of lobelia. They were also used a couple of hundred years ago a lot for traditional medicine and believe it or not in the early 19th century two of the species were used as treatment for syphilis and then a hundred years later at the beginning of the 20th century they were used as an asthma door which means that it was treatment for people with asthma, anyone with a bronchial infection or shortness of breath anything like that so they would take the leaves and they would burn them because in some of the varieties they have a property called lobeline or lobeline which is quite similar to nicotine so they would smoke it and would you believe that in those days a hundred years or so ago the first line of treatment if you had a sore throat or if you had bronchial infections if you had asthma or anything like that the first line of treatment was smoking. How times have changed. So that's really interesting and another group of people who used lobelia as traditional medicine were the Appalachians who lived in America from the Appalachian Mountains area which is where the Laurel and Hardy song Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia comes from it's from the southern tip of New York state down towards Alabama and northern Georgia that area they were an isolated group of people are very associated with poverty and they would smoke the leaves and they would have a very good day let's put it like that so I mean there are a lot of myths and distortions about the Appalachians who knows I'm not saying that it's right it's just what I've read as a possibility and of course probably most medicinal cures from the olden days are now considered to be absolutely wrong but that's just what they did in those days. So I found all those very interesting stories just about the lobelia. I like to find leaves and textures of different colors for the garden this is what they call a beetroot color so it comes under the red section and I try to get red yellow plants green plants and blue plants which is all the four different sort of leaf colors that you can get or the hues of those colors which I think if you put those in the garden it just makes it so much more interesting and that's just the foliage without even getting to the flowers now this particular lobelia as I said it's called Queen Victoria and it's also called the cardinal flower as well it will grow up to 36 inches tall and 12 inches wide it's going to have beautiful red flowers which will be vibrant and they should be from August to October so we should see those very soon it likes full sun and it can do with part shade as well very hardy it's a perennial so it's going to lose its leaves in the winter and come back again next year and also you can divide it probably every other year so I did a video a while back about dividing my campanula so it would be exactly the same way you would dig it up stick a fork in split it apart and divide it but we will do that in two years time I'm sitting in the shade this morning just to do the talking because it has been so hot 31 degrees it actually rained this morning which was so welcoming so it feels a little bit fresher so I want to get these planted before it gets too much hotter and I'll show you where I'm going to put them so as you can see here I've got a gap I love a gap and it's all very green apart from this of course this will come under the red section of the colour schemes but if you put this here I've got two doesn't that just add a lot more colour I love my new Lobelia Queen Victoria and especially interested now I know all its history which always makes it such fun and it helps me remember the plant and what it's all about so let's see how that goes and I've got a few more plants which I will be adding to give more late summer and autumn interest I'm Jeanette I am the Enthusiastic Gardener thank you so much for watching me I have to go in now I am melting take care now bye