Blue flowers

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Today I started pruning my plumbagos; not that ground cover stuff, but the shrub with the wonderful sky-blue flowers. I still have a few flowers going, but I need to get the pruning in early because things will start growing soon. Then this evening I was browsing the web looking for advice on how to start seeds of plants I haven’t tried before and ran across a list of true blue flowers. No plumbago. A few years ago I had bought a packet of seeds and managed to get a plant. I was using the only heat source I had at the time, an electric heating pad placed underneath a plastic box. No real controls, just luck. My neighbor who had a mat designed for starting seeds saw my plant in flower and wanted one, but neither of us could get a cutting to root, so she ordered a packet of seeds, intending to get her bush and a few extras. Unfortuately she hit marital problems, got a divorce and moved to the US. But before she left she gave me her mats, and another friend her seeds. He didn’t have any means of starting seeds in heat, so the seeds sat in his refridgerator for a couple of years. Then he came to me to see if they were still good. I made a deal: I would try to germinate them, and he would get the first to come up, but after that we would divide them 50-50. As luck would have it, I now have 4 more plants and two of them are white. Noone ever said anything about white plumbago, but they do exist. The white ones are just OK, but nothing comes close to that sky-blue color all summer long. And you have to trim them back. Mine grew up to the top of a small tree and made it look as if the tree had flowers.

• 11 Dec, 2009
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