Summer’s Blues Cool in Morning Glory Hues

The flower garden needs some cooling colors to thwart, at least psychologically, summer’s heat.

The reds and yellows of spring and early summer were welcome after a winter of gray and brown, but if it’s time to calm things down, blue is cool. And the purer it is, the cooler it is. Not many flowers, though, have a color as pure blue as a bluebird or the sky on a crisp, cloudless morning.

Many bluish flowers--among them delphinium, cornflower, campanula and veronica--come close, but the red lurking in these blues heats them up a bit.

There is at least one blue flower that is not only fairly pure in color but also easy to grow--morning glory. Ipomoea comes in several colors, but one to grow for blue is the appropriately named ‘Heavenly Blue.’

‘Heavenly Blue’ twines to 15 feet, and its flowers, 4 to 5 inches across, have a yellow throat. The summer annual can be grown on a fence or trellis or used as ground cover. It requires little water once established.

One of the best places to plant morning glory is against an east wall. There, the flowers unfurl as soon as they are touched by the first rays of morning sun. But as the sun rises in the sky, the wall shields the blooms enough to keep them lingering on into the day rather than closing up in the heat and brightness of midday sun.

Actually, a bit of shade from midday sun is good, aesthetically, for any blue flower. Blue flowers, especially pure blue flowers, pale in bright sunlight, but radiate a cool glow in slight shade or morning and evening light.

Don’t fill the whole flower garden with blue flowers, though.

You still need some bright reds and yellows to liven the scene. And reserve some room for the tawny red and yellow flowers of autumn, for these warm colors will be welcome when winter is around the corner.