Tuesday Incoherence

A few posts back I remarked that my volunteer Cerinthes were losing the blue on their bracts;  I was wrong.  In one part of the garden, they are bluer than ever.
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I will try to spread seeds from these plants, and pull the non-blue ones, to keep the blue level high.  They are another plant the hummingbirds love. 

The Silky Net Bush, Calothamnus villosus, is blooming.  I read that it blooms on old wood.  I did not realize when the writer said "old wood", the writer meant old wood.  I thought old growth.  But its really old wood--right on the stems!  More hummingbird bait--with all the nectar in this garden, they may be too fat to fly.
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A rare and perfect flower from 'Tea Clipper'.  
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The buff color reminded me of 'English Garden'.  Here's 'English Garden':
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They are similar in that they produce just a few flowers, all of them perfect and arresting.  'English Garden' is a tiny plant with little vigor that must be babied.  'Tea Clipper' is a large plant that is not babied at all.  


I've been working away at the Winter Project, and have made good progress, though I'm distracted somewhat by a number of things, mostly the puppies.  95% of my bandwidth is puppy.  Four percentage points for everything else, and one percentage point for blogging, which is why posts lately have been nearly mostly incoherent.  Surprisingly I've gotten a lot of things done in the garden, almost to the level of crossing "i"s and dotting "t"s--getting those little irksome things done that one means to do but hardly ever gets to.  One thing was getting rid of the Rosemary, the beautiful lush Rosemary that I loved.  It was harboring rats.  Adios, beloved Rosemary, enjoy the garbage bin.  Though the lemonade produced by that lemon is that I finally might have found the spot for my poor Chondropetalum, which has been stuffed into a pot for years and years.  Dead rosemary stems mixed with rats nest, a bit of the Rosemary left...
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The bees may miss the Rosemary too--but there is and will be Cerinthe.
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Comments

  1. Hoover, your flowers are really beautiful, I have not seen a cerinthes before, such vibrant colours.
    xoxoxo ♡

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  2. Thank you Dianne. Cerinthe is from the Mediterranean around Gibralter. Nice little annual!

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  3. Fantastic post with lot's of new flowers to me.
    gr. Marijke

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  4. I've only seen cerinthes in photos like yours, and they always make me covetous. (A little confession.) I'm sorry you're losing the rosemary, but maybe not so much if the rats go with it. Urk. Rats seem so... NYC somehow, as in subway tunnels and darkness--not what I associate with sunny CA at all!

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  5. @Marijke, thanks!

    @Stacy, fruit trees veggie gardens, and bird feeders mean rats, unfortunately. Plenty of all three around here.

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  6. What a coincidence, I purchased Rose Tea Clipper last autumn. It's just coming into leaf now. Hopefully, I'll get a flower or two later in the year. Your photo looks a lot better than the catalogue ones. Really looking forward to it flowering now.

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  7. Crystal, the flowers are extremely beautiful, vigor is excellent, and the foliage has better-than-average disease resistance here. The big flaw is that it is reluctant to bloom. However, each flower when it does appear is quite an event.

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