I stupidly forgot to include symptoms of the disease yesterday.

I first noticed something was wrong in April after applying manure around 2 year old plants in the field where I grow my flowers for cutting.  Foliage that had emerged healthily suddenly became disfigured on a couple of plants in a planting of around 15.  These were plants that I had raised from my own seed that I had collected from a form that had proved quite stable as a strain.  It seemed to be a hybrid between vulgaris and the long-spurred ‘Dove’ strain with more delicate leaves than normal vulgaris and spurred pom-poms in a pretty powder blue.  All plants were proving vigorous.  The basal foliage looked singed at the edges and was beginning to shrivel.  I put it down to perhaps the manure in this area being a bit fresh and not properly rotted.

As the foliage worsened I thought I would do a search on Aquilegia problems and found information about this new disease which is a form of powdery mildew previously not known.  Healthy plants next to these two continued to grown on and flower.  Initially the flowers looked normal and beautiful.  Then I noticed that some of the new buds were distorting with brown speckles and some of these began to start turning brown as though rotting.  I have cut plants back to groundlevel as detailed in my previous post and intend to do as I said here.

Jane Edmonds