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| Aconitum carmichaelli 'Arendsii' 1 October 2025 |
In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty declares to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
With my roses waning I happily can still use my scanner thanks to some of the other plants like this hosta and the aconitum. Because Rosemary’s favourite colour in the garden was blue she planted lots of aconitum that that have the pleasant feature of blooming in the fall.
My friend, now gone, Wolfram George Schmid who wrote the best book on hostas gave me one tip which I am not aware most people might know. He said that if you put a yellow plant next to a blue one, both colours will be enhanced.
Yellow hostas like this one, Hosta ‘Midas Touch’ are sometimes called gold hostas. As the season progresses and particularly if they get sun they become albescence which is another term that Schmid taught me. Some hostas turn yellow from green. In that case they are lutescent.
I miss my Rosemary because she urged me to learn botanical nomenclature. There are few people, now that heavy duty gardening is in a decline, who are interested in it. How many know that roses do not have thorns but have prickles.
There is something that few know about German-born Wolfram George Schmid. Before he retired to his garden in Atlanta he designed launching pad platforms for NASA.