Happy Independence Day, everyone! We’re thrilled that this year’s July 4th also falls on a Flower Friday as we almost always use our flowers as our salute to the good old red, white and blue!
We’ll use this post to gently remind folks just how important and delicate our modern liberty is. The American experiment in personal liberty is simultaneously fleeting and the single most important, visionary idea to come out of human existence. It is the very reason we can garden, on our own lands, without another laying claim to our works, labor, time or property. It’s important!
That said, let’s get into our patriotic flower selections!
For our burst of red, we’ve lined up a lovely Portulaca flower. These “must have” flowers for us are a flowering form of what is called purslane. Comprised of over 100 different species, we tend to grow mixes that offer us several different colors. Portulaca flowers commonly resemble rose flowers, but despite that resemblance, they have far more in common with carnations and cacti!
Purslanes, specifically portulaca oleracea, can also be grown as an edible garden plant. Though it’s somewhat rare to see in American gardens, the greens can be used in salads, stir fry and even used similar to how one would use spinach. It has sort of a salty sour sort flavor, which we don’t particularly care for. Still, we love the appearance of the purslane and thus pursue this genus in flowering form.
Delving into our shot of white, we chose a spectacular white rose that recently flowered for us in our newly built subarctic rose garden. Our second oldest rose plant, this one marked the first rose species where we really started to delve into some of the more obscure subarctic hardy roses out there. As I took this photo, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the amazing fragrance surrounding the plant.
Perhaps one of the most widely cultivated flowers throughout time, roses are comprised of over 150 unique species and tens of thousands of unique cultivars. Subarctic hardy roses are always hybrids, most often crossed with wild roses found in high latitude environments to achieve cold hardiness. Roses are very easily hybridized, which is why there are tens of thousands of amazing rose cultivars out there!
And finally, for our eruption of blue, we have selected a very special lobelia flower that we found this year. Known as a cardinal flower, we found an ultra rare subtype known as Cardinal Blue or Lobelia Siphilitica. Perennial and hardy to zone 3, we’re really hoping we can keep this one going into future seasons as we absolutely adore lobelia! We found this one exceptionally challenging to grow from seed and achieved maturity with only a single plant.
Though Cardinal Blue is foreign to the west coast, it does grow in some very cold places like northern Manitoba. If we’re able to perennialize this flower, we can expect that it could grow to several feet tall in its lifetime. Unlike most annually grown lobelia that stick close to the ground, Cardinal lobelia tend to produce a spike of lobelia flowers (kind of like a Delphinium) in subsequent years. We may also see that it will self-seed in a highly limited fashion, which would also be OK with us.
We hope you all have a great holiday and that you get to spend time doing the things and people you love. We’re trying to stay on top of watering with the heat we are getting, but the gardens are certainly appreciating it! Enjoy your 4th, everyone!
