Pretty pictures: Pink-Purple to Pink

I've been trying for the last couple weeks or so to sort through the ever-increasing stack of pictures I have, and I have to say, it hasn't actually been going terribly well. It's really time-consuming, and of course I keep taking new pictures as I'm sorting out the old ones, so there's an element of futility to the whole thing.

But, the up side is that I have a bunch of pictures to post now. So here are some. I've decided to go with "pink" as a theme, though the pinkness of some of these is open to debate.

Osteospermum 'Summertime Hot Pink.' Kind of more purple-looking, in this picture. I don't remember exactly if it was really this color.

Clematis 'Nelly Moser?' This is growing in someone's yard in town, so there was no actual ID on it, but I think, after seeing a picture of 'Nelly Moser' at Best in Bloom Today, that's probably what this is. The colors are right, at least, and lynn'sgarden says in the post that it's a popular variety. I wish I'd fiddled with the color a little bit longer; the color here seems a little dull, compared to reality. Oh well.

Catharanthus roseus 'Titan Rose.' One of the things that most pleases me about no longer working at the garden center is that I don't have to deal with the vinca (it's not Vinca, though) anymore. I had bad associations with them anyway, having been forced to plant them once in junior high, at school, for "P.E.," which is a long story and not really the point, but at work, they always had spider mites, and frequently tried to go chlorotic on us, and I just really kind of hate them.

Most everybody still calls this Dicentra spectabilis, but I have it on pretty good authority that the correct name is Lamprocapnos spectabilis. Everybody in town has like six of these, but they're cool plants regardless.

Gaura NOID (possibly G. lindheimeri 'Karalee Pink'). I like these okay, but never see any planted anywhere. I have no idea where they're all going or who they sell to.

Begonia NOID. These are sold as "nonstop begonias," but I don't know if that's an official cultivar name or not. Despite the name, if overwatered, they will stop just fine.

Brugmansia NOID. Every year since 2007, I see these, and my jaw drops and I think I must get a Brugmansia this year, and then every year, fear of spider mites keeps me from actually getting one. We saw this one, and a few others, within the last week, but this one was big and expensive, and the others were doubled varieties (purple/white and yellow). I do not like the doubled Brugmansias and find them unsettling in some difficult-to-explain way. Will this be the year I get one? Maybe. The pink ones are really beautiful.

Pretty pictures: Pink and Purple

Anemone tomentosa 'Robustissima.' I have to say, I'm not sure these could really be called "robust:" they've barely held it together and are only now, this late in the summer, being remotely interesting.

Monarda sp. From the Kent State Park trip, whence I also got a lot of the Yellow pictures, and the Park NOID pictures. (Also the carrion beetle larvae pictures, though those had less universal appeal, it turned out.)

Monarda sp. again. As befits the common name (bee-balm), the bees really were fond of these.

Asclepias incarnata, swamp milkweed, is my guess, though I'm not an Asclepias expert and don't anticipate becoming an Asclepias expert in the future.

Another shot of the Asclepias. I think the main reason I like these -- and I do like them, very much -- is because they remind me of Hoyas.

Pelargonium x hortorum 'Americana Violet." Possibly got the color cranked too high on this one, but in person, you know, they're pretty bright. It's kind of realistic.

Pelargonium x hortorum 'Strawberry Sizzle.' I liked this variety a lot, but the customers . . . not so much. Stupid customers.

Circium arvense? It's a thistle of some kind, but I don't know which. Not a thistle expert either. By the way, this reminds me of something. I've been told that "Hyacinths and Thistles" is something sadistic speech therapists try to get lispy kids to say. It's fun to try. It's also, incidentally, the title for an album by The Sixths. Which is how I found out about the speech therapist thing. One feels bad for the college station DJ who had to talk about "the new album from The Sixths, 'Hyacinths and Thistles.'

Good album, though, incidentally. The fifth track, "Just Like a Movie Star," is sort of an important song to the husband and I. Not "our song" (that's probably the Cowboy Junkies cover of "Sweet Jane"), but one of "our other songs."

The Sixths' other album is "Wasp's Nests," which is clearly titled the way it is for the same reasons as "Hyacinths and Thistles."

Catharanthus roseus 'Pacifica Lilac.' This is an old, old picture, from before the spider mites overran all the Catharanthus (no I will not call it "Vinca:" it's not Vinca.). Pretty, but so not worth the trouble. I've sort of had a grudge against Catharanthus since the mid-80s: I was sort of forced to plant some when in junior high, at a tiny Christian school in Alamo, TX, long ago, and I wasn't happy about it. Calling it "P.E." doesn't make it any less slave labor.

Pardancanda 'Sangria.' Similar to the Belamcanda chinensis, presumably related but I haven't investigated this. I liked the Belamcanda a lot better, initially, but I've warmed up to the Pardancanda. This is a nice color.

More Pardancanda 'Sangria.'

Work-related: the Vincaphant and the "C Game"

A lot of the outdoor spring stuff we get in arrives in trays of what are called "plugs." (I'm told this is because they're roughly the same size and shape as a spark plug.) They're just seedlings that have been germinated in a tiny plastic cell (depending on the plant, this can be as small as half-inch / 1 cm squares), and by the time we get them, they're often getting pretty close to rootbound already.

Tray of Vinca minor seedlings -- or is it?

A lot of what needs to be done in the late winter, then, is to transfer these plugs to whatever container we want to sell them in; for some plants, this means "six-packs," which are roughly hand-sized plastic trays containing six cells, each of which contains a plant. (There are also four-packs, and for some plants we plant plugs directly into a three- or four-inch pot, or even a gallon pot, something which I don't advise you to do at home with just any old seedling.) The transplanting is a long and tedious process, which I sort of wish I could do more of, because instead of long and tedious but simple and comprehensible, I wind up running all over the place putting out (metaphorical) fires and being interrupted by somebody or another every time I turn around. (I tried to deal with this by just not turning around, but that didn't work either: I still got interrupted, and I kept getting further and further away from stuff besides.)

It's done now, but a large part of the last week or so has been Vinca minor, "Lesser Periwinkle," which I have issues with right off the bat because there's also a Vinca major, and a "Madagascar Periwinkle" (Catharanthus roseus). If the plant we are doing is in fact Vinca minor, then I'm irritated because it seems obvious to me that the names should be the other way around, and major should be minor and vice-versa. But from looking around on-line, I think actually the plant I've been calling Vinca, because everybody else calls it Vinca, is actually Catharanthus, which all makes me want to take my ball and go home, because it's hard enough to learn all these names without people deliberately trying to confuse the issue by calling things by the wrong name.

Anyway. So but the point is, potting up plugs basically works like this, for six-packs: you take a six-pack, fill it with dirt, water the dirt, make six holes in the six cells of (now-wet) dirt, stick six plugs in the six holes, and then move on to the next. In practice, this is done more assembly-line, with lots of watering, then lots of hole-poking, and so forth, but that's the basic process.

And this gets really, really boring in short order. Since we don't have the teevee or the intertubez to occupy us, we have to make our own fun, which can be difficult to do. What one of my fellow pluggers and I did was, we started to "draw" pictures in the trays by pulling plugs out selectively, sort of like a Lite-Brite in reverse. Co-worker did a credible bird head (aiming for a puppy, but what're you going to do), which I didn't get a picture of, but I came up with a marginal elephant, which I did get a picture of, and which I referred to at the time as the "Vincaphant," though now I'm thinking it should probably actually be the "elepharanthus" instead, since the more I look at the pictures the more convinced I am that what we're planting is not Vinca at all.

The Vincaphant / elepharanthus.

The other good way I've found to stay entertained while doing mindless work is called the "C Game," and is something that we used to do during long tedious periods at a previous job. The "game" is just, you take turns naming words that begin with a pre-specified letter (which at the other job used to be the letter C, most of the time, because those games seemed to be the most entertaining and long-lived, but which I played with M for the one attempt so far at this job, and it went okay. From previous experience, I know that J and K are not good letters; R, S and T are all pretty workable.). This is every bit as easy and mindless as it sounds (an advantage, because you don't want something that's going to slow down the tedious work you're doing), but it's also unexpectedly fun sometimes. Also you'd be surprised how quickly you run out of words.

The C Game has no scoring: you can't use a word that has already been used by someone else, and plurals are discouraged. You only "lose" if you give up and drop out of the game of your own volition. There's an "oooo" bonus (where everybody says "oooo" admiringly) if you come up with groups of words in a row that are 1) meaningful as a group and 2) start with the same letter, e.g. "belly button" for the letter B, "Marilyn Monroe" for M, or "chocolate chip cookie" for C, but nobody keeps track of who's gotten more "oooo" points; it's just something that can happen. I don't anticipate a lot of C-Game time, because for obvious reasons it only works when a bunch of people are all stuck together for long periods: normally we're bringing stuff in and taking stuff out kind of all the time, so there are constant interruptions. But try it yourself if you like.