Silene latifolia Seeds | White Campion
LATIN NAME: Silene latifolia
COMMON NAME: White Campion
Plant Profile
White Campion is a short-lived perennial of European hedge banks and field edges, with pale green leaves, sprawling stems and open white flowers that unfurl in the evening and scent the dusk. Behind the open flowers the calyces swell into inflated bladders crossed by a network of fine veins.
It grows in ordinary to rough ground, flowers through the summer, and survives as a rosette through winter. In the garden it belongs in a wild patch or along a hedge, where its evening scent and pale flowers are visible precisely when the rest of the border is dark. The rosette of winter is a plain circle of leaves, and the flowering stems rise from it in May, so a patch sown one spring is at its best the following year.
Science & Biotechnology
White campion is one of the few dioecious plants of the temperate flora, with male and female flowers on separate plants, and its sex chromosomes have made it a textbook subject for the study of how plant sex chromosomes evolved. A second famous feature is anther smut, a fungus that fills the anthers of infected plants with dark spores and sterilises them without killing them, a classic case study in disease ecology.
Both features keep it a regular in genetics teaching and research, and gardeners may notice both: roughly half the seedlings turn out male, and an occasional flower goes dark and sooty.
Uses & Benefits
It is grown for the evening garden and the wild patch: scented at dusk, attractive to night-flying moths, and content with rough grass or a hedge bank where mowing is late. Its seed feeds finches late in the season.
In meadow-style plantings it interleaves with ox-eye daisies and wild carrot, and its bladders add shape to a summer vase of wild flowers. Children have long used the bladders as poppers between the fingers, and the plant’s habit of standing in rough grass makes it a safe introduction to wildflowers for exactly that audience. Its white flowers also photograph well against dark hedge foliage, which has quietly made it a favourite of evening garden photographers.
Growing from Seed
Sow the seed on the surface in spring or autumn and press it in; light helps germination, which takes two to three weeks.
Grow the seedlings in pots until they show their character, since the sexes cannot be told apart before flowering, and plant them out in drifts so that both are present.
Set them in ordinary to rough soil in sun or light shade; afterwards the plants hold their own and seed themselves gently without crowding their neighbours. Once established, cut the patch only after the seed has mostly fallen, since the plant renews itself from shed seed more than from the root.
Our Take
A dusk-scented wildflower with a textbook life of its own: separate sexes, sooty smuts and white flowers for the moth hour.
Related Reading
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