Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Blues

Is there such a thing as too many little blue flowers? One spring, I saw a bed of mixed blue bulbs at Brookside Gardens and thought I could duplicate it.The 50 million Muscari are descendants of the dozen or so bulbs I planted 20 years ago.

Muscari armeniacum
The 70 million Scilla sibirica are descendants of the 100 or so bulbs I planted. I knew I wanted a lot of Scillas. The hillside by the Knoll at Iowa State was covered with these when I was a student there.

Scilla sibirica
Chionodoxa sardensis might be my new favorite, however. It wasn't part of the original blue bulb bed, but purchased a couple of years ago when I was trying to identify other Chionodoxa .

Chionodoxa sardensis
The other Chionodoxa is below. It comes up in the woods every year, and migrated there from my original blue bulb bed. If only I had kept better records.

Chionodoxa ?
Not all my little blue flowers are bulbs, but I really must find a better spot to plant the Veronica 'Georgia Blue'. You can hardly see it among the Scillas.

Veronica Georgia Blue
I like the violets...

Violet
...but their cousins are showier.

I think pansies/violas should have faces.

10 comments:

Alyssa said...

Hi UnCultivated (Entangled), Fantastic pictures! I've also got all of those blue flowers in my yard, but, except for the scilla, the rest aren't blooming yet. I don't think you can possibly have too many blues either. Don't you love how some of them just spread all over - I find them everywhere. The daffodil pictures are lovely also. What type of camera do you use. My digital doesn't seem as sharp. Pick a little blue bouquet for me. Bye for now, Alyssa

Annie in Austin said...

What a lovely trip among the little bulbs, Entangled. I planted tons of scilla, chionodoxa, grape hyacinth and puschkinia in Illinois, but don't know if there are 70 million of them now:)

We have grape hyacinths, but the other ones aren't supposed to do well so I didn't plant any. But looking at yours, it might be worth it to put chilled bulbs in and think of them as annuals.

Annie at the Transplantable Rose

Entangled said...

Alyssa, thanks for stopping by. I left a comment on your blog about your corydalis and forgot to bookmark it - I'm glad you found your way here. My camera is a Canon Digital Rebel, but I usually edit the photos before posting. I've been playing with a feature in Photoshop Elements to sharpen the photos while resizing them. I've only had the Canon since December - before that I was very happy with my Fuji FinePix.

Annie, I may have exaggerated on the number of bulbs just a bit :-) I used to have puschkinia too, but I haven't seen it lately; might be too far under the shrubs now.

Ki said...

Very lovely, all my favorite blue bulbs. I thought a large bed of Scilla sibirica would be spectacular.

I too am coming around to think that Chionodoxa in all its forms may become my new favorite.

ericat said...

lovely photos and flowers !! I have all yellow, orange and red. I do need blue. In our water restrictioned garden we need bulbs that flower in winter. (our rain season) sigh... lovely the blue blog.
You might like to take a look at some of our endemic lilies here in the western cape of south Africa. They are not in quantity but some you may not have seen before.

Ewa said...

blue is soo grat in the garden! your pictures are great! Thank you for sharing.
Greetings,

Entangled said...

Ewa: Thanks for stopping by! Some of my ancestors were from Poland - coming to the US in the late 1800s. This blog was temporary while I was moving my web site to another hosting company. My regular garden blog is at Tangled Branches: Cultivated.

Gardengirl1952 said...

Wow just hit your page of blue flower pictures and I just can't wait to get back into my yard and garden. I love blue flowers and can't find enough tho I'll be on the lookout again this spring.
Linda

Entangled said...

Gardengirl1952: There's just something about blue - I don't know why, but everybody seems to love it. I can't wait until it's little blue flower time again - we just got a surprise snowstorm in northern Virginia yesterday.

Anonymous said...

OOOh, i love all the blue flowers.