Pretty pictures: Blue

I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday hasn't been great so far. I woke up while having a dream in which a hairdresser was being really rude to me because I couldn't pay $60 for a haircut (Yes, even my subconscious is on my case about what a loser I am. Though, really, it's my subconscious's fault for taking me someplace pricey in the first place: it knows as well as I do that we don't have any money.), and everything's kind of been downhill from there. I was kind of stressed and annoyed anyway, for reasons we should probably not get into.

So I was toying with the idea of just posting a picture of a brick wall, because I couldn't think of anything else, but I eventually realized the stupidity of that plan. And so we have blue flowers.

Ageratum NOID. I have nothing new to say about Ageratum.

Tradescantia NOID. These are pretty much over now, but for a brief moment, they were blooming all over the place, in fairly substantial numbers, which was cool.

Hydrangea NOID. This is a really old picture, from the former job, that I only recently got around to dealing with.

Centaurea cyanus. This particular plant is growing in some cracked pavement here in town, probably not on purpose. The plant as a whole is not especially photogenic, and the background (somebody's junk shed, it looks like) is even less so, but the close-up sure turned out pretty.

Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue.' This is from a semi-recent visit to the ex-job. They're very pretty, but I still haven't forgiven 'Black and Blue' for becoming overrun with aphids the first time I met them (in the spring of 2008). Consequently, I can't look at them without seeing aphids. At least not yet. Maybe someday.
Tomorrow, Lord willing and the creek don't rise, we'll have the first part of the Ananas comosus post, which is the not-especially-useful-but-much-more-entertaining part. (Footnote 5 is possibly my favorite footnote ever. And a while after that, there are stripper poles. So you know it will be good.) Since the bulk of it was written prior to Tuesday, it's much more cheerful than this. So . . . see you then? (UPDATE: And so it was.)

Work-related: Three plants I just don't get.

Amid the various pretty flowers and stuff at work, there are a few plants we sell where I just don't see the appeal. These are them:

Gomphrena 'Gnome Purple'
Gomphrena is the basis for a small running joke at work: Younger Co-Worker commented a few months ago that the name sounded sort of like a disease, and so whenever I'm feeling kind of run-down I try to mention to her that I'm having another flare-up of the ol' gomphrena again. There's a second joke behind the first joke, which is that I think the real-life disease she was referencing was most likely gonorrhea, which does add a little something to the humor even if I can't quite put my finger on it. (There's even a third joke to be made off of the previous two. Something about purple gnome gonorrhea: I can feel that there's a joke there but I can't figure out how to make the joke work properly.)

Anyway. I don't find this a terribly objectionable plant. It's behaved well in the greenhouse, and we even sold most of it, so it's okay. It still strikes me as being a weird thing to try to sell to people. The flowers aren't especially showy, and there are other things out there that will get you the same color. So I shrug.

Lobularia maritima 'New Carpet of Snow'
Alyssum is also just okay, as far as I'm concerned. The flowers smell nice, but the plants don't seem to stay looking very good for very long. We have a real problem with not being able to ignore the plants that want to be left alone; after enough overwatering, Lobularia start looking kinda weedy. Or not even weedy. Weeds, after all, often look quite vigorous and healthy. Our Lobularias start to look like weeds that have migraines. I do understand wanting to buy them when they look good, and so far at any given moment we've had some looking nice, for anybody who wanted them, but even when they look nice they're not especially showy, and it's not like it's hard to find substitutes with small white flowers (Bacopa or Euphorbia 'Diamond Frost,' e.g.). They're also so tiny -- which could be our fault, not the plant's -- that it's hard to imagine any practical gardening use for them. Which is probably a failure of imagination on my part.

Ageratum 'Azure Pearl'
Ageratum, though, wins the prize for winning the fewest prizes. Unless it does something really cool later on in the summer, I cannot imagine why anybody would want one of these. I mean, hell, I actually forget that they're there, a lot: the leaves are nothing special, the flowers are simultaneously small, somewhat unflowery-looking, and a washed-out color to boot. Also, we have at least three varieties ('Azure Pearl,' 'Hawaii Blue' or 'Blue Hawaii,' and a third one that I can't think of right now), but the flowers are, as far as I can tell, all the same kinda washed-out, very slightly purplish baby blue. Looking Ageratum up on-line didn't help answer any of my questions, either.

So I submit the question to you, the reader: what, if anything, do these three do? What makes them something that people would want to buy? Do you like them yourself? Etc.