Singing the Blues...of the Garden

 While flowers in any colour are quite lovely and sometimes fantastic, the blue flowers are definitely my absolute favourites. True blue flowers are quite rare, and as anyone who has ever browsed a seed catalogue, a plant website, or a nursery can attest, those who describe flower colours often play fast and loose with what they define as being blue. This flower, blue pimpernel (Anagallis 'Skylover') is for real blue.

 Often, the so-called 'blue' flowers are more purple than they are blue, which is fine because purple is a great colour, but when you have your heart set on something really blue and you get purple...well, it can be a little disappointing. This is an agapanthus, and it's fairly blue, but I see purple tints in those flowers, too. My other agapanthus is white with a blue stripe, and somehow, it seems more blue. Go figure!

Colour Echoes in the Garden

One of the great joys of gardening, of course, is the chance to play with colour. It's like painting with plants: you get to create wonderful colour combinations that please your eye, and that can be changed up yearly, or by moving a couple of container plantings around. 

We all have particular colours that please us, or that we use a lot of in a garden planting. Myself, I am fond of pretty much all colours in the garden,  but I have made a dedicated effort this year to creating drifts of colours. I'm doing this for several reasons.