Chocolate cosmos (Cosmos atrosanguinea) is both of those nose and eye candy for your backyard. When it is really in whole bloom, experienced blossoms on prolonged, slender stems glimpse like sweet kisses on a stick and fill the late afternoon with the sweet scent of vanilla tinged chocolate. New blossoms hug the foliage of the plant, approximately concealing it with their numbers! Include to that the sweet chocolate fragrance and you conclusion up with anything very particular.
Even though chocolate cosmos is endangered in the wild, transplants are effortlessly discovered at most nurseries and backyard garden facilities in the spring. However, gardeners who are inexperienced in how to improve chocolate cosmos could ignore what appear to be compact, messy tangles of miniature dahlia leaves, unaware that at the time proven, prolific blossoms nearly conceal the foliage. As soon as in bloom, chocolate cosmos blossoms repeatedly through the summertime into the initially frosts of autumn.
If you are organizing a gothic garden, chocolate cosmos is the plant for you. Occasionally referred to as black cosmos, dim maroon blossoms are so deep in colour that they show up brown/black in late afternoon and evening.
A native of Mexico, the chocolate cosmos is a 50 percent-hardy perennial and a sun loving plant that is moderately drought tolerant.
You will most conveniently develop chocolate cosmos from transplants bought at your local garden center or nursery. Large clumps of established plants can also be divided to offer as lots of as three or four transplants.
Plant chocolate cosmos in organically rich, properly-drained soil in a place that will get comprehensive sun. Continue to keep the transplants moist until finally they proven roots and you see the beginnings of some new expansion.
In the fall, when foliage dies again, lower plants again to about two inches from the root and more than-wintertime them in a frost-free place. Chocolate cosmos is hardy in zones 7-10. In these zones, you may perhaps opt to include the plants with a cloche to secure them from risk of frost.
