almost red white and blue natives

We had some peo­ple over to view the local fire­works yes­ter­day. To mark the occa­sion I threw together some of the bloom­ing natives from the gar­den for a pas­tel ren­di­tion of the red, white and blue theme of the day.

White was the easy color. Sev­eral white buck­wheats were bloom­ing, and I picked some stems of the flat-top buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum. Its broad, open umbels also look a bit like fireworks.

For red, the dark rose col­ors of San Miguel Island buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum grande var. rub­sescens) pro­vided a rea­son­able stand-in. If I had some Del­phinium car­di­nale in the gar­den, it would have really pro­vided a bright scar­let kick. Maybe next year…

For blue, the pick­ings got pretty slim. The blue-violet whorls of Cleve­land sage (Salvia cleve­landii ‘Win­nifred Gilman’) were the clos­est I could come up with. As with the white buck­wheat, the struc­ture of the stems seemed a bit like fire­works, with whorls of lit­tle tubu­lar flow­ers explod­ing out from the stem.

The result was a lot less sub­tle than flo­ral fire­works, but I liked how it marked the occa­sion and cel­e­brated a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia sense of place.

Many of the peo­ple who showed up knew I was a plant nut, so two of the host­ess gifts were col­or­ful florist bou­quets. One of them marked the occa­sion by includ­ing red, white and blue flow­ers. But even florists with all their inter­na­tional resources some­times have prob­lems with the color blue. This florist’s solu­tion? Why not dye white flow­ers blue? The results don’t look much like any­thing in my Cal­i­for­nia gar­den so the gift flow­ers and the local posies weren’t inter­mixed, and the dif­fer­ent bou­quets have their own places around the house.

I hope you all had a great fourth!

July 05 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • | 9 Comments »