Re: Spring blooms, especially orange, blue and yellow!
david feix wrote:
>
> After this bout of warmer weather recently, my own
> garden has just exploded into bloom. It is incredible
> to see how the plants I have seem to respond to the
> warmer temperatures in the same way I do! Some of the
> things that are looking most impressive at the moment:
David
A mouth-watering description for me as my garden winds down to winter.
>
> Abutilons of all sorts,(red, yellow, orange, pink) are
> in full bloom now, the pale orange of A. 'Victor
> Reitor' is particularly nice, as they are wide open
> and face out so they can be seen well,
Well, I can almost match you in this (though none of mine are
up-facing). Not anything fancy but a good selection of A X hybridum,
nearly all my own seedlings. I started with a rather dark orange I got
as a cutting from a friend and this for many years threw
identically-coloured seedlings before suddenly bursting out in a
tremendous variety of shades from white to deep burgandy. This leaves me
in something of a quandry as I feel constrained to let each baby flower
now so as not to miss some new ravishing beauty but I don't have all
that much space!
I still have my "old faithful" which from time to time I savagely cut
down to keep it youthful and I think it must by now be at least twenty
years old. In my mild climate (down to -3°C) it actually never stops
flowering and lures bumble bees out of hibernation sometimes even in
midwinter if the day is sunny.
One colour it has not provided is a soft true pink, so I actually bought
this a couple of years ago. I hope I shall get some new interesting
crosses as a result.
Someone gave me a cutting last year of a clear bright scarlet, which I
would have loved, but unfortunatley it was midwinter when I got it and
even in my glasshouse with night heating it failed to take.
I don't know where it came from (it was not from the garden of the
doner) and I have never seen it offered for sale around here, alas.
Moira
--
Tony & Moira Ryan <theryans@xtra.co.nz>
Wainuiomata (near Wellington, capital city of New Zealand)
