When René van Gaalen presented the plant registration authorities with his latest Delphinium endeavour, he really set the cat amongst the pigeons.  

For Delphinium 'Starmaker' refused to behave itself, sometimes producing deep blue flowers, sometimes lighter ones, and sometimes they were even mostly green. Sometimes the flowers faced upwards and sometimes they faces outwards.

And as if this wasn't enough, 'Starmaker' has a lovely party piece it performs at will - the ability to send up new flowering stems from the centres of already blooming flowers!    

'Starmaker' in one of its greener moods. The original mutation looked similar to this.

  
No doubt about it - the variety itself is stable - it's just that it reacts very differently to various light condidions. This isn't an uncommon quality on plants, but with 'Starmaker' the consequences are a little more dramatic than most!  

The 'Starmaker' story began in 2000 in Ecuador in one of René's production fields. Here, among the crop of 'Völkerfrieden' he was growing for cutflowers, he discovered a strange mutation.  

The plant had green flowers, who's petals were somehow fused with the stems, meaning they wouldn't drop off in a hurry. Plus each flower was sending up a new shoot which was topped with another flower.   

The plants themselves were also shorter with a bushier habit, making them more suitable for garden use than as a cutflower variety.  

"Interesting!!!!" thought René, and rushed straight off to see what he could do to develop the mutation into a desirable garden plant.  

By making crossings between the mutation and other Belladonna type Delphiniums such as ‘Peacemaker’, ‘Atlantis’, ‘Völkerfrieden’ and a white variety, René manages to introduce  more colour into the flowers.

However, at the same time he noticed that the crossed plants had a strong reversion tendency towards the cultivated variety he'd used. The solution was to make the crossed plants mutate themselves, in order to make them stable.

By 2001 he had produced a number of variations on the theme, from which one was selected to become 'Starmaker'.

Delphinium 'Starmaker' puts in a good performance in the garden, helped by its improved mildew resistance. The flower colouring and habit is effected by the light conditions at the time when the flowers beging to form. Full information about this can be found in Arie's growing advice section 'All you need to know'.