Get Growing - Purple shirt day

A Gardening Blog

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Posted by Craig Sailor @ 02:21:47 pm

I'm wearing a bright purple vintage shirt around the office today. I trot it out every now and then just to hear the many derisive comments from the more staid members of the newsroom.

Keeping with the purple theme I kept my eye out for purple blossoms on the way to work today. Turns out there a lot of purple themed flowers out there (magenta, lavendar, etc.) but not a whole lot of true, deep purple.

I don't know what variety of azalea this is but it has to be the most pure purple I've seen. It's living on Proctor Street.

Another purple favorite this time of year is rock cress. It comes in a variety of purple shades. This photo turned a bit blue but trust me: it's purple. And a bonus: rock cress is native to our Cascade range. When the summer wildflowers start to bloom in Mt. Rainier National Park rock cress is everywhere.

I'll sign off not with purple but with blue. True deep blue is another rarity in the plant world. Lithodora is just that. The color of crayon blue. Deep and unashamed of its blueness. It's a great evergreen groundcover. And oh so blue.

Categories: Flowers

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Craig Sailor is the Arts & Entertainment editor at The News Tribune. Last year he planted his first vegetable garden. Focusing on unusual varieties, “Freak of Nature” returns for 2008 with a new crop of uncommon vegetables and flowers. This year he’ll try yin yang beans, giant pumpkins, blue poppies and mutant sunflowers. He gardens at his North End Tacoma home and sneaks seeds in to his mother’s garden at Willapa Bay when she’s not looking. .

Sue Kidd is the Lifestyle Editor at The News Tribune. She is a devoted vegetable gardener, but otherwise a tragic mess at growing just about anything else. Her current obsessions are growing tomatoes on a trellis and trying to convince all her South Hill neighbors to ditch the chemicals and go green in the garden (they are very suspicious of her). She’ll blog about garden gadgets, the latest garden trends and her current garden disasters. She is also the ringleader for the Home&Garden section, so e-mail her with thoughts/rants/questions/bizarre observations. sue.kidd@thenewstribune.com. Use it.

Contact us at Sue.Kidd@thenewstribune.com Craig.Sailor@thenewstribune.com

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