True Blue : South Coast Botanic Garden’s New Collection of a Different Color
BLUE IS SUCH a prized color for flowers that gardeners seem willing to accept any number of imitations: Lobelia, the summer bedding plant, is called blue but is really purple; the ground cover ajuga is described as blue but is lavender; campanulas tend toward purple, and even trusty “blue” agapanthus are really a violet-blue.
During the American Bicentennial celebrations, people were desperate for blue flowers to complete red, white and blue schemes, and the summer annual ageratum was often planted. But ageratum is so suffused with red as to appear purple, and on camera film it turns positively magenta, so these color schemes tended to appear red, white and magenta--an unhappy and not particularly patriotic ending.
Our eyes do not always detect the red in so-called blue flowers. Many types of camera film are sensitive to the magenta in garden blues and expose this presence of red. Our native ceanothus (which actually come pretty close to a true blue), photograph as magenta, and the so-called blue hibiscus, shown here, photographs purplish but is actually a bluish lilac (it also is not a hibiscus but an Alyogyne ).
A “blue-flower” section now being developed at South Coast Botanic Garden on the Palos Verdes Peninsula already includes some of the area’s most attractive plantings of blue hibiscus. It also has some very unusual shades of blue, such as one of the most mysterious colors I can think of--the smoky-purple flowers of Iochroma cyaneum . Look as well for the many cultivars of rosemary that the botanic garden is collecting. More blue flowers are on the way. The secret to using flowers that are supposed to be blue is to use them next to other distinctly different colors. Agapanthus look quite blue next to yellow coreopsis; delphiniums, which can be a true baby blue, look bluer next to pink, and so on. Put blue flowers next to blue, and you will see that none of them is truly so.
When planning, remember that blue is a shadowy color that recedes from view. Used in the distance, it can make the far boundaries of a garden look so distant as to be lost in a haze.
