Pulmonaria
Blue Ensign (Lungwort)
“The shade garden's March miracle. Pure blue funnel flowers without the usual pink-to-blue colour change, on a tough, ground-covering, weed-suppressing plant. Earns its rent in three weeks.”
— ROSIE
Rosie's Take
Pulmonaria is one of those plants that people walk past for eleven months of the year, and then in March it does something that makes you crouch down and actually look. 'Blue Ensign' produces clusters of funnel-shaped flowers in a deep, pure, gentian blue — no spots, no silver-marked leaves, no distractions. Just that extraordinary blue, hovering on short stems above plain, dark-green foliage, at a time of year when the garden is desperate for colour.
Most pulmonarias do the famous colour-change trick — flowers opening pink and aging to blue, so you get both colours on the same plant. 'Blue Ensign' doesn't bother. It opens blue and stays blue. That commitment to a single colour, that refusal to equivocate, is part of its appeal. It knows what it is.
It's a woodland plant at heart — happiest in dappled shade with humus-rich soil that doesn't dry out completely. Under deciduous trees and shrubs, along the north side of a wall, at the base of hedges — the places where nothing much happens in March except pulmonaria. I grow it under a hazel, where it flowers before the hazel leaves unfurl, catching the early spring light that won't be available once the canopy closes. By then, the pulmonaria has done its work and settled into a ground-covering mat of leaves for the rest of the year.
The leaves are good but not spectacular — plain dark green, slightly bristly, disease-resistant, weed-suppressing. A working foliage plant that does a quiet job for eleven months and then, for three or four weeks in spring, delivers a display of blue that stops you mid-stride. Every garden needs a few plants that earn their rent in a single, brilliant performance. Pulmonaria 'Blue Ensign' pays up in March.
✿ From the folklore cabinet
Pulmonaria means 'of the lungs,' from the doctrine of signatures — the medieval belief that a plant's appearance indicated its medicinal use. The spotted leaves of some species were thought to resemble diseased lungs, so the plant was prescribed for respiratory complaints. Whether it worked is debatable, but the common name 'lungwort' has stuck for five hundred years. 'Blue Ensign' was raised by the British plantsman David Tristram, who selected it for that pure, unshifting blue — a colour rare in the genus, where most flowers transition from pink to blue as they age. The name is naval — a blue ensign is a flag, and for a plant this colour, it fits perfectly.
