Cornflower Seeds Centaurea cyanus - is a familiar and beautiful plant, evocative of a past era when they filled our cornfields with colour, growing alongside poppies and corncockles. Sadly this plant is now very rare in the wild, but thankfully its effects can still be recreated in gardens and road verges etc. Cornflowers should be sown onto well drained fertile soils where there is plenty of sunlight. The deep blue flowers appear in high summer and attract bees, and butterflies, followed by seed-heads that attract birds such as goldflinches. Cornflowers look best when grown with Corn Poppies, Corn Chamomile or Corn Marigold which provide support for the cornflowers and various spectacular colour combinations.