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.)

Random plant event: Centaurea volunteer

For the most part, what's come up in last year's vegetable garden has been no big surprise: it's mainly dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and goosefoot (Chenopodium album) and other weedy stuff. I haven't been very interested in looking at it, as a result (we haven't even been sure we necessarily want to try growing anything in it again this year: an argument could be made that neither of us actually have the time), but I do remember seeing a plant come up in its center early in the spring, that was much bigger much earlier than anything else, and wondering idly what kind of weed grows that fast.


Well, as you'll have deduced from the title, it's turned out to be a volunteer Centaurea, presumably the descendant of a plant I bought last year for the garden but wound up potting in a container because trying to decide where to plant things was just too much pressure. (Although I recognize that plants can be dug back up and moved around, it's still a lot more commitment than my plants indoors are, where if I don't like where something is I just pick up the pot and move it.) The container in question was nowhere near the vegetable garden, ever, but apparently they don't have to be.


It's not the prettiest plant when not in flower. It's not even the prettiest plant when it is in flower. The flowers look . . . undercooked, somehow. But I'm inclined to leave this plant right where it is. We've been having a terrible time coming to any kind of decisions at all about what plants we want in the yard, or how many, or where that part of the yard should be, whether we want to build raised beds or just dump a bunch of dirt on the low part of the yard in the back of the lot and plant them directly in that, and so on and so forth. If this particular plant thinks that this is a good place for it to be, well, that's one decision I don't have to make.

The down side? Some Centaurea species are known to be invasive, and this is probably one of them, something I didn't know when I bought the plant. So it may not get to stay after all. This will be discussed in considerable detail tomorrow and Friday.

Picture: Ants on a Centaurea bud

Didn't seem quite right to tag this as a "pretty picture." It's not especially pretty. But "unpretty picture" seemed harsher than necessary. So it's neither. Just a picture. (It is somewhat more attractive close-up, though: try opening in a new window for best effect.)


It would appear that maybe peonies are not the only flowers that enlist the aid of ants in opening their flower buds. Or maybe there's some other reason why they would be so interested in this particular bud. I don't know. Fairly certain there's an explanation somewhere.

Uh-oh.

A quick inventory of the plants I have purchased to use at the house in an outdoor and/or container-gardeny capacity:

6 Ageratum, some blue variety
1 Bracteantha bracteata, yellow
3 Bracteantha bracteata, orange
1 Caladium 'Gingerland'
4? Caladium bulbs (don't remember the ID; unplanted)
12 Capsicum annuum (jalapeno pepper)
1 Centaurea montana NOID

Centaurea x 'Montana.'
1 Colocasia spp. (elephant ear)
3 Dichondra 'Silver Falls'
1 Euphorbia dulcis 'Chamaeleon'
1 Fragaria 'Fort Laramie' (strawberry)
8 Gazania 'Tiger Mix'
1 Geranium 'Rozanne'

Geranium 'Rozanne.'
1 Lantana 'Rose Glow Improved'
1 Lysimachia 'Goldilocks' (moneywort, creeping jenny)
1 Matteuccia struthiopteris (ostrich fern)
3 Osteospermum 'Bronze Charmer' (African daisy)
60 Portulaca 'Tequila Mix' (moss rose)
1 raspberry cane (Rubus) of unknown cv.
1 Salvia elegans (pineapple sage)
3 Scaevola 'New Wonder'

Scaevola 'New Wonder.' All three of the plants pictured in this post are very close to being the same shade of purple-blue, as is the Ageratum (unpictured). So at least that much will look co-ordinated.
1 Sempervivum 'Red Beauty' (hen and chicks)
1 Solenostemon 'Kong Aline' (coleus)
6 Zinnia 'Profusion Fire'

plus, seeds for:

blue morning glories (Ipomoea 'Flying Saucers')
more marigolds (Tagetes patula 'Jaguar')
some variety of sweet corn (Zea mays)
cypress vine (Ipomoea quamoclit) and hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus) (thanks, Zach!)
nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus 'Cherry Rose Jewel')

plus a fairly large number of plants which could wind up inside or outside (coleus, Tradescantia pallida, Cordyline fruticosa, etc.). And I'm not even necessarily done buying stuff: there's been some thinking about which things to plant with which other things, and I'm realizing that most of this doesn't go together especially well, so I may "need" more. Plus, there was already stuff planted at the house. I predict that my "garden" is going to be a mess, at least this year.

The moral of the story is probably that known plant obsessives should be strongly discouraged from exploring new forms of plant-buying, and/or shouldn't work in a garden center during spring when many, many new plants are available all at once. Both of which are things we kind of already knew.

Pretty picture: Centaurea x 'Montana' flower

Yet another perennial. I like these colors together, the black and blue and pinky-purple, but something about it looks sort of . . . unfinished? Perhaps if there were a lot of blooms going at the same time. As it is, it's B-/C+ work at best.

I think I prefer the smaller, more compact annual Centaureas. Which we do not sell. Anybody want to weigh in on this?