Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

• Muscari racemosum. Blue bottles. (aka, grape hyacinths. The “grape” refers to the way the flowers are clustered like a bunch of grapes, not the color.)
• Nemophila insignis. Baby blue eyes.
• Hyacinthoides hispanica. Spanish bluebells
• Lupinus texensis. Texas bluebonnet.
• Commelinantia anomala. False dayflowers. (solid blue and a bicolor)

Recently I tweeted about Suntory having GMO’d a “blue” rose. In response, @CarolineSays linked to a blog post by Chris Clarke Daze of Whine and Roses, which scoffed at the very idea that Suntory’s rose was blue. Lilac or mauve, maybe, but not blue.

In flower terms, “blue” is a pretty expansive color term–just like black, which typically is a really, really, deep red. So I decided to inventory my own blue flowers. Of course, the camera lies. Depending upon the settings in your camera, the setting on your monitor, or any number of other variables (photos shot in full sunlight, bright shade, full shade), colors are going to differ.

Massed, bluebonnets are a deep indigo or jewel-toned blue. (At least mine are. Some are a more pale sky blue.) Spanish bluebells look anemic beside them. Baby blue eyes are a hazy day sky blue. But in the photo they look almost lavender…or like my favorite crayon as a child “periwinkle blue”. In life, false dayflowers are an electric, aniline blue. In my photo, they have a reddish tint compared with the bluebonnets.

I wanted to see if some of the “lavender” blues looked more like blue when compared to flowers that I think of as purple in the garden: Texas mountain laurel, tradescantia, and verbena. And they do. The color of the Suntory rose seems similar to the periwinkle blue of the rosemary and baby blue eyes.

Purple and blue flowers blooming at Zanthan Gardens on March 29, 2010

So I’m not going to get on Suntory because their new flower isn’t really “blue”. Rather, I’m still disappointed that they think developing a blue rose is worth messing around with genetically modified organisms.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens invites us to tell her what’s blooming in our gardens on the 15th of each month.

March 2010

The redbuds are Austin’s harbinger of spring but in 2010 it seemed they would never bloom. More than three weeks later than normal, on March 6th, I started seeing redbuds around town. After that, Spring cut loose. It was as if the other flowers had to wait for the diva to take center stage before making an entrance. Tazetta daffodils that are usually in flower in January bloomed alongside jonquils and large-flowering daffodils. The larkspur, which typically blooms a month after the bluebonnets, began blooming almost a week before.

Despite the devastations of record drought and freezes, the garden springs back.

Between GBBDs

Two stems of ‘Ice Follies’ daffodils came back after a couple of years of not blooming. I thought I’d lost them for good. I had divided them over the year and at one time had 8 groups.

Complete List for March 15, 2010

The list of all plants flowering today, March 15th 2010, at Zanthan Gardens. This is the fourth March I’ve participated in Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Compare: March 2007, March 2008 (most floriferous), March 2009 (18 months into the drought).

• Commelinantia anomala
• Consolida ambigua
• Coriandrum sativum
• henbit
• Iris (unnamed blue)
• Iris albicans
• Kalanchoe daigremontiana (Mother of Thousands) in pot
• Leucojum aestivum
• Leucojum aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’
• Lobularia maritima (white)
• Lupinus texensis (including a pink opening today)
• Muscari neglectum/racemosum
• Narcissus jonquilla ‘Trevithian’
• Narcissus tazetta ‘Grand Monarque’
• Narcissus tazetta ‘Grandiflora’
• Nemophila insignis
• Nothoscordum bivalve
• Pisum sativum ‘Progress #9’
• Pisum sativum ‘Wando’
• Prunus mexicana (big tree finished, 2 small trees at height)
• Rhaphiolepis indica
• Rose ‘Ducher’
• rosemary
• Sophora secundiflora
• Tradescantia

Saturday morning the designer from Floribunda is coming over to assess whether we can afford his services to design and construct a screened-porch house to replace our falling down shed. After booking the appointment, I looked around my yard and panicked. I haven’t mown the lawn yet this year and the weeds are about a foot high. Garden tools and hoses are scattered about giving witness to my short attention span. Only the imaginative eye can discern the wildflower garden hidden in the among the dandelions, thistle and chickweed.

And inside the shed! Of course he’ll have to go in the shed to measure and check the foundation. Myself? I haven’t been in the shed in over a year. During our kitchen remodel we just kept stacking boxes and torn out pieces of house in there until it was impossible to get one more thing in. Last summer the paper wasps took over and we let them have their way with it.

So, I spent the day trying to make the place look less like we lived here and more like “important clients whom you might want to include in your portfolio” lived here.

I didn’t get much done though because I kept getting distracted by spring. I spent a lot of time taking photos of the Narcissus ‘Hawera’ in bloom. Then I had to lie down on my belly and admire the Muscari racemosum (or is it M. neglectum?)

Grape hyacinth aka starch hyacinth aka M. racemosum aka…

I found one bluebonnet bud that had finally blued up and opened. And lastly when I was watering the magnolia (which you might notice is not cleaning the shed) I saw another anole, the third this week, basking itself among the Mexican plum blossom. Trying to get a photo of the anole ate up a good portion of an hour. (Mostly I just sat and talked to it.)

I stopped and looked at everything so the garden doesn’t look like much of anything–I did manage to build a garden sculpture out of bricks I found in the shed. I’d been meaning to do that for several years now.