Six on Saturday #57 (June 20, 2020)

Is it Saturday again?  Here are six plants that are currently flowering.

1. Amorpha canescens (leadplant)

This is a plant that rewards close inspection.  Its purple flowers with golden yellow stamens are gorgeous, but tiny.  A. canescens is native to the central United States, from Minnesota and North Dakota to Texas.  I grow it a sunny, dry location near our rosemary bush.

2. Canna ‘Lucifer’

The somewhat dull orange-red flowers of ‘Lucifer’ can’t hold a candle to Canna ‘Flaming Kabobs’, but ‘Lucifer is probably much better suited to small gardens.  It is a miniature, standing only 3 feet high with inflorescence (90-100 cm), less than half the height of ‘Flaming Kabobs’.  I am growing it in somewhat poor, dry soil, but it has proven to be a tough little plant and has slowly spread into a clump about four feet wide.

3.  Habranthus tubispathus var. texensis (Texas copperlily)

This is a rather nice weed.  Seed must have drifted from some potted bulbs, and now a little Habranthus is blooming right at the edge of our driveway.  H. tubispathus has a disjunct range in southern South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the gulf coast of the United States.  It seems likely that it was originally native to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, but was introduced to other areas by early Spanish explorers and settlers.

4. Lonicera sempervirens (coral honeysuckle)–again.

Although some selected cultivars of our native L. sempervirens flower on and off for much of the summer, this wild vine at the edge of my garden usually blooms only in April.  I suspect it has been induced to flower again by the unusually cool and wet weather we have been having.

5. Buddleja davidii (butterfly bush)

I’m keeping a watchful eye on this plant.  It volunteered in the garden and has the potential to become quite invasive in our climate, but so far I have not found any more seedlings.  I keep it around, despite its large size and ungainly branches, because butterflies adore the flowers.  Some years, it is completely smothered in several species of swallowtail butterflies, but this year there are hardly any around.  I wonder if the wet weather is to blame.

6.  Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Bailmer’ (Endless Summer Hydrangea)

I have shown this plant before, but it is blooming particularly well this year.  Gardeners generally think that blue flowers occur when H. macrophylla is grown in acidic soil and pink flowers in neutral or alkaline soil, but the situation is a bit more complex, depending on availability of aluminum ions and the amount of phosphate in the soil.  Having blue and pink flowers on the same plant, and even on the same branches, should probably tell me something about my soil chemistry, but I have no idea what.

The Propagator is the host of Six on Saturday.  Head over there to see his Six and find links to the blogs of other participants.

Renanthera Jenny Wren

‘Tis the season for Renanthera flowers.  My R. imschootiana is still blooming, and this week the buds on my R. Jenny Wren started to open.  Renanthera Jenny Wren is a complex hybrid whose ancestry incorporates R. storiei, R. philippinensis, R. monachica, and R. imschootiana.   The mix of lowland (R. philippinensis, R. monachica) and higher elevation species (R. imschootiana, R. storiei) has produced a fairly adaptable grex.  Although it has several doses of genes from the giant R. storiei, the other parent species are smaller, resulting in a more manageable plant. Flowers seem to be somewhat variable.  My plant has rich, red flowers with darker red spots, but here is a plant with red spots on an orange background, more reminiscent of R. monachica.

The cross was made by Carter and Holmes Orchids, but I requested, and was granted, permission to register the grex when I first bloomed it in 2004. I named it for my wife, Jennifer.