There have been moments in my life where I’ve been moderately obsessed with the Mountain Bluet aka perennial cornflower, or Centaurea montana. Can you blame me? It has the most baroque tracery of black-edged bracts wrapping decoratively around the involucrum (the swollen bit around the base of the flower of many daisy-type plants). This feature alone would qualify it to double as an ornamental ceiling boss between the vaulted timber ribs of a medieval country church. Instead, here it is, in my flowerbed.