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| Hostas - 18 July 2026 |
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| Crambe maritima & Rosa 'Oliver Roellinger' 18 July 2026 |
The powdery
blue coating on hostas is naturally called leaf wax or leaf bloom. In botany,
plants with this type of dusty, waxy coating are described as glaucous. Hostas
don't actually have blue pigment. The leaves are naturally green, but this waxy
layer reflects light in a way that gives the plant its distinct blueish-gray
hue. Plant Delights Nursery
In 1966
while in the Argentine Navy I had a lovely girlfriend called Susana. One day I
received a phone call from her. She said, “Don’t ever call me again. You have
no culture and you will never amount to anything. I have a new boyfriend who
plays the violin for the Teatro Colón Symphony.” For weeks on end I kept
playing the Miles Davis record Kind of Blue and Ástor Piazzolla. I discovered
so I thought that hitting my depression rock bottom was the way out.
In 1987 I returned
to Buenos Aires and rang the bell at Susana’s apartment. She opened the door
and said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?’
In my now
close to 7000 blogs I find that linking my past memories to my plant scans
gives me the excuse to use those scans.
Blue was
never my favourite colour. It was Rosemary’s. We had all kinds of blue plants. The one here, Crambe maritima was
one of her favourites. When my Argentine artist friend Juan Manuel Sánchez
handed me a Chilean translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain I learned of
that gentians grew in Switzerland. To surprise Rosemary I found Gentiana
asclepiadea at a nursery. She was delighted.
It is
blooming now. I will scan it soon. The flowers remind me of Sánchez and
Rosemary.
The hostas in the scan all kind of look the same and mixed them up. They are H. 'Neptune', H. 'Dancing with Dragons'', H. 'Wild Imagination', H. 'Halcyon' and H. 'Dorset Blue'