Aquilegias are very promiscuous, Robby, and will interbreed freely. The same has happened in my garden - there are different colours every year.

'Nora Barlow' is lovely, I bought one a couple of weeks ago and am very pleased with it.

I have an aquilegia plant that has not flowered as yet; but my other ones have the deep purple vulgarius and the Ruby Port vulgaris var. stellata are growing really well. Is there anything I can do to promote flowering, please?

I find that they may flower a little in the first spring after germination, but it is the second or third year before you get a really strong display. Then they do well for a few years and disappear. The self-seeded plants will eventually degenerate to less attractive forms, although quite what you end up with depends on the plants they are breeding from. Aquilegia species come in almost any colour, red, blue, yellow, white, pink, and shades in between.

Hello Ruby (are you the lady I spoke to at Frost's today?),

As far as I know, Aquilegias will flower well as long as they're happy. In the garden here, on well drained slightly alkaline soil, they seed themselves everywhere and flower very well. They tend to like sun or dappled shade and soil that doesn't dry out too much.

Because they interbreed so well, it's probably worth getting new varieties from time to time.

If you can get hold of species Aquilegias, such as Aquilegia chrysantha (yellow), A. canadensis (Red and yellow) and Aquilegia oxysepala yabeana (purplish blue + white) These tend to stay true as they don't interbreed as readily as the A. vulgaris hybrids.

A canadensis and skinneri don't like wet, in my experience. According to the North American indigenous plants people, both of these prefer dry-ish conditions and about 16" rain a year. There was uncertainty about whether lime or mildly acid was useful.

So my wee treasures went into terra-cotta pots, in my best sun, and slunk back from the edge of extinction. (We get around 50" of rain a year in this area.)

Earlier this year I picked up a remaindered pale blue and intensely double form of A vulgaris which I'm hoping will seed generously. Any clues to its provenance would be welcome.

I suppose the question is: If, as already stated, A. vulgaris is so promiscuous, how does Nora Barlow manage to procreate little 'Nora Barlows' rather than inferior forms?

Bertivert8 - Regarding A. skinerri - I would be delighted to find seeds of this, as every single lot of seeds I have bought have turned out not to be A. skinerri, but A. canadensis or A. formosa. The latter two grow really well for me and we have very much more rain than 16" a year, I think it's more to do with drainage than rainfall, as is the situation with so many plants.

RobbyEm, It's all to do with dominant and recessive genes, if you want more information there are some websites I can recommend that are great explaining basic genetics.

Thank you DD, I thought it must be down to some complex biology.

I went out to check my Aquilegias again and was pleased to find a pure lemon-yellow type with spurs up to 2 inches long. Back to what I had when I started, at last!

if you want to keep the yellow, I suggest that you pull up all others and only let the yellow go to seed. If you weed out all others that come up every year that aren't yellow, you should end up with a yellow only strain in just a couple years.

That sounds a good idea Don G. If I allowed only the yellow ones to seed, is it possible to estimate what proportion of them would be yellow-flowered offspring?

Ha! Ha! If you could estimate that, then you should know the winning lottery numbers!
Seriously though, if you saved the seed from a yellow that was surrounded by other yellows, I think you'd have a high percentage of yellows. But then bees can cover a lot of territory. The trick is ruthlessness in pulling out everything that isn't what you want every year before they get a chance to pollinate others. It's hard though because some will be very pretty. You could move them to another part of your garden if it's large enough and get different seed strains. Aquilegias move easily enough.
I used to have cream california poppies in the front of my garden and orange/yellows in the back - a difference of a hundred feet. Now I only have oranges at the back as other front garden plants outcompeted the cream poppies.

We have watched self-seeded aquilegia grow in our garden since planting the first seeds about 15 years ago. Amazingly they seem to colour code. For example we have mauve growing next to mauve alliums, white next to a white potentilla, cream/yellow near yellow wallflowers and dark purple next to purple irises. Has anyone else noticed this simlartiy in colour to other surrounding plants?