Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Ur-blotanical

If Gertrude Jekyll were alive today, she’d be blogging like a maniac. Apart from her instructive writing on garden design and general horticulture, she loved the rabbit-hole digression on offbeat topics—she was the Ur-blogger on gardens.

I looked to her diatribe on the naming of plant colors when I was trying to describe the Pink Indigo. Jekyll informs me that mauve is French for mallow. Of course many mallows are not pink, so mauve as a color name is flawed from the get-go. Hence, her point that naming plant colors is futile. Especially since soil and nutrients can have an effect on leaf and blossom hue.
So the color of the Indigo eludes description… not pink, not lavender, the closest I can come is strawberry ice cream that has melted.
The best news to report is that the supposedly fussy fuschia is literally suffocated with buds!



Effusive Fuschia
















Oh, and the lightning bugs are back in full force

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It will be months before we have lightning bugs here. I love them but right now, we have the peepers and they are music!

Anonymous said...

A mauve by any other name...it is quite pretty though isn't it? I love the lightening bugs but we are months away from their evening displays. Are the hummingbirds visiting your fuschia?