Zanthan Gardens
Weblog of a Central Austin Garden

Dateline: February 2, 2008

The Anemone coronaria has sprouted adding to my anticipation of spring. This is the first year I’ve grown them.

In the days when people spent more time observing nature than television, this week marks a significant moment in the year, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Many cultures celebrate this turning point in winter as the beginning of the new year, the beginning of spring, even though for many the worst of winter is yet to come. For Christians, the end of the Christmas Season and the liturgical year is celebrated at Candlemas. Americans try to forecast the weather on Groundhog Day. The Chinese New Year (based on a combination of solar and lunar calendars) begins. And the Japanese celebrate setsubun, literally halving the season, driving evil spirits from their house while inviting good ones to stay on the eve of spring.

Anticipation of spring is running high here at Zanthan Gardens. The Spanish bluebells, Hyacinthoides hispanica, are nosing up.
I planted them to remind AJM of home. Traditionally the English have used Spanish bluebells in their gardens because they are larger than the native English bluebells of the woods. However, recent worries about non-native plants have created controversy over Spanish bluebells. I’m surprised they do so well in Texas. They’ve come back every year neither increasing much nor diminishing.

I was very excited to step out into the garden after a few cold wintry days and see the Tulipa clusiana. I was afraid that with all of the rain last summer that these species tulips had finally rotted away.
Tulipa clusiana likes hot baking summers and doesn’t require any chilling period to bloom. As such, it is the ideal tulip for Austin, where most tulips are difficult to naturalize.

I worried that last summer’s rain might have also done in the delicate triandrus daffodil “Hawera”. This is one of the few daffodils I’ve grown which has come back reliably over many many years and flowers without any chilling.

Like Yolanda Elizabet at Bliss, I’m excited to see the summer snowflakes coming up. Unlike many bulbs, they don’t mind Austin’s clay soil.

The overwintering annuals have put on lots of growth–or at least the ones that I managed to thin and replant during December have.

This is the second year I’ve grown bachelor buttons, Centaurea cyanus. In fact, these plants are from the seeds I had leftover from last year’s seed packet. I’m so pleased with their perfomance (and how easy they are to grow) that they have one a place in my permanent repertoire. Behind the bachelor buttons in this photo are the baby blue eyes, Nemophila insignis, which desperately need to be thinned.

This weekend promises to be beautiful, sunny and in the 70s. I have loads of pruning, weeding, and transplanting to do (and watering because it’s been so dry). What joy it will be to be out in the garden, though, checking over all the plants just waiting to burst forth in bloom.

Update: February 2, 2010

In some ways, Spring 2010 couldn’t be more different than Spring 2008. Then we were at the beginning of the drought and now we’ve had 5 months of cool, rainy weather and a killer freeze. All the overwintering annuals are large and plentiful and trying to bloom well ahead of schedule. Because this winter has been cloudier and cooler, this copious tender growth keeps getting nipped back by weekly freezes.

The Anemone coronaria did not survive the drought. Nor did my narcissus. But the Tulipa clusiana, Spanish bluebells, and Leucojum aestivum carry on rain or shine.

2010-02-02. Larkspur buds. The larkspur, which are usually in full bloom in April, keep sending up flower stalks that are cut down with each freeze.

While the rainy weather has allowed the self-sown annuals (including weeds) to proliferate, it has kept me from most of my gardening chores. I haven’t even sown many new packets of seeds such as the bachelor buttons yet. I have a short window of opportunity in which to sow seeds around Christmas after the leaves fall. If the weather is not encouraging or I’m too busy with the holidays, then I miss my chance before the heat sets in. Not that I won’t try anyway. This year might be a long cold spring letting us have flowers into May. Well, we can dream.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens invites us to tell her what’s blooming in our gardens on the 15th of each month.

January 2010

Nothing to see here. Austin suffered through three days of our coldest temperatures in two decades and we’re still figuring out what died and what survived. My one new flower for the month, a single Narcissus italicus froze and fell over.

Now it’s raining. And raining and raining and raining. As the only two plants flowering in my garden have “insignificant” flowers (as the botanists say) and they’ve appeared in my GBBD posts before, I’m not going to get cold and wet to get a blurry photograph of them again.

If you want to see true grit and creativity in the face of disaster, hop on over to the The Transplantable Rose where @AnnieinAustin has made a great video of her Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, January 2010.

January 15, 2010

The list of all plants flowering today, January 15, 2010, at Zanthan Gardens.

• Lonicera fragrantissima
• rosemary

Dateline 2010
The first week of the new year has been blackened by the ominous forecast of the coldest weather since the big ice storm of the first week of February 1996 (when AJM and I were marooned together). Not only will this freeze plunge Austin temperatures to the teens, it will be cold for several days: too long and too cold for plant covers to help much. While the first freeze of the season cleared the garden of overgrown annuals this one threatens to kill long cherished tender perennials. Cue much moaning and gnashing of teeth in the Austin garden blogosphere/Twitter.

I spent Wednesday (1/6) ahead of the front digging up what tender perennials I could: the amaryllis (all but the butterfly amaryllis had died down anyway in lighter freezes), scores of aloe vera, and the largest banana. All these plants needed dividing or moving to a sunnier spot. Nothing like the threat of disaster to focus and motivate.

Some losses will really hurt. I’m going to hate to lose plants I’ve grown over many years from very small plants especially the lemon tree, asparagus fern, and the philodendron–all which I planted out last year after they became too big for pots. I will be sad to lose my rosemary which I was training into a weeping tree form. I lost my first big rosemary in a similar freeze years ago.

Other plants I’m not going to be sorry if they get cut down to size because they’ve been unruly, overcrowding and shading the neighbors: the variegated Agave americana, the three Duranta erecta, the Port St. Johns Creeper (which had already frozen to the roots in earlier freezes). I’m very bad at pulling out something that survives because so little does. So I’ve let these run wild even though they’ve overstayed their welcome.

This hard freeze is particularly frustrating because so many plants put on a lot of growth since September during the rainy period Austin’s had after our 2-year drought. The cilantro and some larkspur are already sending up flower stalks and have buds–two months before normal. The Acanthus mollis has early summer growth already, its new leaves a fresh bright green and glossy. Worst, the fall vegetables were just starting to get growing in the last month after the pecans and oaks finally shed their leaves. We’ve harvested one cutting of Mesclun and that’s it. Goodbye English peas, swiss chard, and various other greens. Luckily these are easily replanted. Also agonizing will be the loss of many plants that I’ve struck from cuttings.

First flower: Narcissus italicus, (1/1). Only one flower. It’s been a very disappointing year for N. italicus and not a single paperwhite bloomed this year.
Blooming (very little after a couple of hard freezes): Lobularia maritima, Lonicera fragrantissima , Oxalis triangularis (white), Narcissus italicus.

Related

If you’re preparing for the oncoming winter storm, read Frost and Freezes from the Travis County Extension Agent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photographs attracted me to The Sensuous Garden and after buying and reading it, I think the photographs are the best thing about this book. Anyone who knows me at all will recognize that I’m damning with faint praise.

I wanted to like this book. I marked up so many quotes to pull from one page of the introduction, I wouldn’t know where to begin.

As a garden blogger who’s corresponded and visited with other gardeners, I can’t help but agree with the idea that “the most interesting thing in any garden is the person who gardens in it”. Like Monty Don, I’m not in favor of litmus tests to determine who is a real gardener. Don’t grow veggies? Don’t have a compost pile? Don’t grow plants from seed? That’s okay. As long as your garden brings you joy.

So why can’t I like this book more? Where do we part ways? I have two others by Monty Don, My Roots: A Decade in the Garden (2005) and The Ivington Diaries (2009). Something about Monty Don’s narrative voice just rubs me the wrong way; I have to accept that we have basic personality differences. (We had a very civil email discussion after my previous post on him.) He describes himself as a man in touch with his feminine side. I could be described as the opposite. Rather than using gender-specific (or stereotypic) labels, I see our differences via Myers-Briggs; he tilts the scale far to the F (feeling) side and I lean about halfway toward the T (thinking) side. Ultimately my head rules my heart; this is not to say that I am unfeeling. I am a tactile learner and I’m attracted to plants for their scent and texture as much as I am to their color or flowers.

The Sensuous Garden is organized like a buffet table. There are chapters for each sense including the sense of intuition. The chapter on sight is subdivided into essays on light, shade and each color in the garden. The chapter on scent focuses on each of the four seasons and trees. The chapter on touch touches on the topics of soil, tools, feet, foliage, bark, and noli me tangere. All these tidbits don’t add up to much food for thought.

In celebrating sense (and sensuousness) is it necessary to abandon sensibility? My bias is toward focused topical essays whether they are in blogs or in the newspaper columns of Henry Mitchell, or the short essays of Elizabeth Lawrence, Katherine S. White, and Margot Rochester. I drink in the garden with my senses but I digest it with my mind.

Rather than the photographs illustrating the ideas of the text, the text seems to get in the way of the photographs. The words don’t draw me in. They don’t leave me with anything to think about. They are strangely sterile. They hold me at arm’s length. I feel like I’m listening to a docent at a public garden rather than chatting with an avid gardener who’s invited me to see his private garden.

Even the layout of the text irritated me. Each chapter begins with a one page introduction that is one column wide set entirely in double-spaced italic. Italic! Double-spaced! I can appreciate type used as an element for graphic design but in a book where the user is reading page after page, designing for readability should be paramount. It’s not enough to look pretty. The rest of the book alternates between a 2-column and 3-column layout which have shorter, more readable line lengths.

Monty Don ends with the words that there are no rules to gardening. Then the prevarication “at least, the rules that do exist are merely guidelines.” (Did Pirates of the Caribbean steal this line from Monty Don? “…the code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”) And this is followed by a page of “non-rules”. So I close the book with a snap because I believe that there are rules. Break them if you will but be prepared to pay the price in money, time, and frustration.

I do realize that Monty Don is trying to encourage beginning gardeners who are intimidated by the “experts” to just go out and have fun in their gardens. Do what makes you happy in the garden. Take chances. Don’t let other people sit in judgment on your garden. Have fun. I believe in all those things. I take them for granted. I’m lucky enough to live in Austin where people make garden art out of old bicycles and make garden beds out of rusty wrought iron ones and park cars on what would be their lawns if they hadn’t let the grass die. I don’t hang around with snobbish garden professionals at the Chelsea Garden show. I don’t have the English gardening establishment to react against.

I’m reacting against the other side of the spectrum: against an establishment that think teaching specific techniques somehow crushes the creative spirit, against people who think that studying something somehow diminishes our ability to marvel over it. I believe that anyone taught basic skills will enjoy some measure of success and that when left to their own devices only the naturally gifted succeed. The rest of us give up thinking that you either can do it or you can’t.

Despite starting from opposite ends of the earth and fighting all the way, both Monty Don and I reach the same conclusion: observe. Use your eyes, your ears, your nose, your skin and your mouth. Get past the flowers and experience the dirt, the foliage, the bark, and the bugs. Zoom in for the micro view. Stand back for the macro view. Get on you roof. Get down on your knees. Watch the light. Notice how the garden changes from hour to hour and from season to season.

Pay attention.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens invites us to tell her what’s blooming in our gardens on the 15th of each month.

December 2009

The last couple of Decembers, I managed to sneak in a flowery GBBD before winter’s first hard freeze. This December the hard freeze came first to Austin and so there is very little blooming in the garden today.

New for December

Only two plants began flowering since November’s GBBD: one passalong blue bearded iris and the winter honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima. That’s a long name for an insignificant flower. It’s power is in its scent. Both began blooming yesterday (12/14).

Winter honeysuckle.

I also bought a tray of yellow snapdragons. They hardly seem like real flowers since I bought them in bloom and they look more or less the same weeks later. I usually buy violas but I couldn’t find a color I liked this year.

The white marigold ‘Kilimanjaro’ bloomed just days before the freeze and then died. The paperwhite narcissus, the first of all the narcissus to bloom, are usually flowering in my garden by now. They are flowering elsewhere in Austin but not here. Mine need dividing, I think.

Hanging on

Pacific chrysanthemum caught the fancy of several garden bloggers during our field trip to the San Antonio Botanical Gardens. I picked up a plant at the Antique Rose Emporium that same trip. The flowers are a pretty gold but I’m more attracted to the foliage.

Pacific chrysanthemum.

Snow fell in Austin since November’s GBBD but it didn’t stick. The closest I have to a carpet of snow is a little clump of sweet alyssum which survived the heat of summer.

Sweet alyssum.

The roses ‘Ducher’ and ‘Red Cascade’ which were in full bloom before the freeze have survived. Some of the smallest buds froze and never opened but the larger flowers still look pretty from a distance. On closer inspection you can see they were nipped by the cold but unlike so many other flowers, they didn’t turn to much and go brown.

December 15, 2009

The list of all plants flowering today, December 15, 2009, at Zanthan Gardens.

• Ajania pacifica (2009)
• Antirrhinum majus (2009)
• Aster ericoides (2007, 2009)
• Commelinantia anomala (2009) a few flowers, most froze
• Galphimia gracilis, indoors (2009)
• iris, unidentified blue bearded (2009)
• Lobularia maritima ‘Tiny Tim’ (2007, 2009) survived the summer
• Lonicera fragrantissima (2009)
• parsnips (2009)
• rose ‘Ducher’ (2007, 2009)
• rose ‘Red Cascade’ (2009)
• rosemary (2007, 2008, 2009)
• Setcreasea (2007, 2009) green
• Tagetes lucida (2009)

People have told me that I should write a book. After reading Margot Rochester’s Down to Earth, I don’t feel the need to. I turned page after page and thought, “Hey, that’s exactly what I’m always saying.” I knew I’d found a true kindred spirit. And she’s written my book for me.

Of course, the title clued me in. I’m both passionate and practical, a combination which confuses those who think every choice is an either/or choice.

From the first line in her preface, “Ruth, Henry, and Allen…My Gardening Gurus” Ms. Rochester had me hooked. Ruth Stout. Henry Mitchell. Allen Lacy. They were among the first garden writers I read and are still among my favorites. (I’d add Elizabeth Lawrence.)

Down to Earth is a book of short essays. Like Mitchell, Lacy, and Lawrence, the essays are part informational and part philosophical, all written from personal observation. They could easily have been blog posts. Although arranged by topic and season, the essays can be read in any order whenever you have a moment. Then you can think about the couple of pages you’ve just read as you spend the rest of the day in your own garden. There’s an index. This is not specifically a how-to book although there is a lot of how-to information.

There are no glossy photographs in this book. There are no pictures at all. The focus is on the writing. And on the gardening. I appreciate this more and more. I grow so weary of books and blogs which are nothing but pretty photographs. Eye-candy is very sweet but you can’t survive on a diet of sugar. I need some meaty thoughts. I need substance. I needed to get Down to Earth. Here are some tidbits.

“A garden is not a matter of space. It is a matter of pleasing yourself with plants that speak to you. Fill your garden with color and texture and mass and, most of all, with memories of people who have given you plants and shared your passion.” p 49 Top Tens

“As your old wood bloomers finish up, make a note to yourself when his happens so you can compare flowering times from one year to the next. With your old-and-new-wood bloomers, make notes to yourself about when they bloomed so that you can think about them over the winter. I am shamefully hit and miss with my own record keeping, but it is a habit that I mean to develop.” p. 62 Queen of the Climbers (clematis)

“When a plan is more trouble than it is worth, get rid of it.” p 141 Knowin’ When to Fold Em

“I know I should think about design before purchasing plants, but that is not my nature. I do not have a design. I have earth to be filled with plants that speak to me.” p 166 Container Gardening (filling in and moving plants around…an intuitive approach to design).

“Ten invasive plants were listed…and six of them are in my garden, invited there by me. An invasive plant, by definition, spreads aggressively and is especially problematic when it spreads into a new habitat and overwhelm the native plants growing there.” p. 180 “Thugs in the Neighborhood

“…I have to be honest. I am a loose gardener.
When I am asked to make suggestions about other people’s gardens, I recommend that we go inside the house an look out from the kitchen sink, the dining areas, the home office, the family room…the places they lie and look out windows. Doing this not only allows us to design pleasant views, but it ties the garden to the house.” p 201 Intimate Spaces

I originally checked this book out of from the library. I fell in love with it and bought my own copy.

Update

In looking for more information about Margot Rochester on the web, I came across this tribute. She died in October, 2008..

Dateline: 2009

2009-12-05. Per the Weather Underground: Bouldin station. Hard freeze (28°F or below) from 2AM-8:30AM. Freeze 9:30PM-9:15AM

I felt giddy and full of energy today because of (rather than despite) the hard freeze last night which laid to rest half my garden for the year. The garden was full of fresh greenery and bursting with flowers from this year’s weekly fall rains. My regret at seeing so much die back or die outright lasted only while I took my inventory. What I felt instead was freedom and a sense of new possibilities.

Zanthan Gardens didn’t get a hard freeze at all last year. Back in 2006, I was ready to start the year afresh and wishing that last year’s annuals would Just Die Already. The worst kind of winter we can have in Austin is mild in December and January followed by a big winter storm in February or even March. By then, you’ve spent countless hours covering and uncovering plants and bringing pots in and taking them out again. You’ve babied the garden and pulled it through a few light frost or short freezes and then, wham! an ice storm.

So if Austin is going to have a hard freeze at all this winter, I’m glad it was the first winter storm and not the last one of the season. As @AnnieinAustin remarked, “better swallowed by whale than nibbled to death by minnows!”

Now I can really look forward to my spring garden. It helps that the pecan and persimmon trees dropped all their leaves in a matter of hours. (Quite a few Austinites tweeted about this phenomenon this morning.) The front yard is back to being in full sun and I can transplant my larkspur seedlings. The Port St. Johns creeper which smothered the back fence, the grape, a ‘New Dawn’ rose, and a stand of yucca can be pulled out.

I’m still assessing the damage so I’ll be updating this list. Sometimes, it takes several days for freeze damage to become apparent.

Killed
basil, cosmos, datura, tomato

Damage on some growth
aloe vera, amaryllis, jalapeño, Meyer lemon (covered), Salvia madrensis (covered),

2009-12-05. Although frost tolerant to 22°F, the Meyer lemon showed damaged to new, tender growth even though it was covered.

Died back
fig, banana trees, coral vine, cypress vine, duranta, elephant ears, kalanchoe, Port St. Johns creeper, purple Wandering Jew, turks cap,

Not affected
asparagus fern, cilantro, larkspur, lavender, love-in-a-mist, oregano, parsley, roses, sage (culinary and Jerusalem), sweet alyssum, snapdragons,
Read the rest of this entry »

I love white flowers. In the heat of summer, they look so crisp and refreshing like wealthy women who never sweat in their white gloves and linen dresses. In Austin’s summer, it’s hard to be out in the garden when the sun is. White flowers, which reflect the most light, make wonderful twilight or moonlight gardens.

Marigolds are one of the easiest heat-tolerant annuals available. They are so easy to grow that they are often included on plant lists for children’s gardens. And they make good companion plants in the vegetable garden because the distinctive smell of the leaves throws off the bugs looking for tomatoes and other goodies.

If bluebonnets can come in colors other than blue, can’t marigolds come in colors other than gold? (Clearly the marketing name for screaming orange). I’m not the first gardener to wish for a white marigold. Others have been obsessed by the idea. For over 20 years Burpee offered a $10,000 prize to the breeder of a white marigold. 80,000 people tried for the prize. In 1975 Burpee awarded it to Alice Vonk. They called the new marigold ‘Snowbird’.

Garden History

2009-01-11
Tweeted @MargaretRoach that I always wanted to try white marigolds but that I wasn’t sure about ordering seeds from Burpee.

2009-02-28
Receive a packet o white marigold seeds from Pinetree Garden Seeds a gift from @indygardener who says life is too short not to try what you want to try.

Seed packet description: Vanilla white 2″ flowers on 18″ tall plant.

2009-03-20
Plant the marigold seeds in a flat of 2″x2″ cells.

2009-03-24
Marigold seeds sprout. (4 days). Almost every seed sprouted.

2009-04-19
Plant out 9 marigold plants. Out of 24 which sprouted, 15 damped off. I plant these marigold in prime garden real estate next to my tomatoes. This raised bed is filled with bought soil from the Natural Gardener and gets a lot of sunlight with some afternoon shade. Because I water the tomatoes every day, I’m reminded to water the marigolds.

2009-04-23
Pillbugs eat 2 of the marigold plants, leaving 7.

In May, we go to San Francisco for several days. When we return, only 5 plants have survived the heat without being watered. In September, we are gone for another week and on our return only 2 plants have survived. In the drenching rains that follow the penultimate plant dies, leaving a lone survivor. It is about 20 inches tall but has fallen on its side. Along the horizontal stem, new growth and buds spring. But the buds never seem to open.

2009-12-03. The remaining plant on its side.

2009-11-12
I send @indygardener a photo of a bud I hope will open for GBBD. It doesn’t.

2009-11-23
The first bud which has almost formed a flower opens, although some petals are dwarfed or missing. It is not a clear white or even pale ivory (or vanilla, as the seed packet describes it, which I assume means it is supposed to be a bit yellowish). It is a greenish tint.

2009-12-03. More than a week later, this first bloom finally looks white.

2009-12-03
The first flower which opened finally looks white. New opening flowers still look greenish yellow. Tomorrow (12/4) a possibility of snow is forecast for Austin and then by Saturday morning we will flirt with our first hard freeze with temperatures around 28°F. So I despite half a dozen buds, I think this is the last day for white marigolds.

2009-12-03. The remaining buds will probably never get a chance to open.

In Other People’s Gardens

Carol @ May Dreams Gardens (aka @indygardener) also planted some ‘Kilimanjaro’ marigolds.

A contributor to Dave’s Garden had a negative rating for ‘Kilimanjaro’. Even though she grew them in Madison, WI she experienced many of the same problems I did.

Dateline: 2009

History repeats itself. A gloomy week is forecast and I spend today tidying up the mud room (aka the entryway) and bringing in aloe, kalanchoe, and golden thryallis which I’ve potted as backup plants. Just in case. I planted out my Meyer’s lemon, my cutleaf philodendron, and my ‘Ming’ asparagus fern because they got too big to lug in and out. If I installed grow lights in the mud room, I wouldn’t have to cart the pots in and out. But that room doesn’t have any electrical outlets so this probably won’t happen anytime soon.

The leaves are all turning color. I always think this is late until I look at my notes. The umbrella tree is a brilliant yellow. The Mexican buckeye and the pecans are a mottled, muddy yellow. The Mexican plum trees are a bit more golden. The Japanese persimmon is just turning orange and red. And the red oaks are blushing a deep red from the top down. Once again the ginkgo is a dud; it lost all its leaves before they turned yellow.

All the rain has fooled the cilantro and the false dayflowers into thinking it’s already spring. The whole yard is thick with both of them. The cilantro will be flowering soon and the false dayflowers have been flowering for a couple of weeks. Yesterday, (11/28), AJM and I trimmed back the fig ivy on the chimney so that we’d be able to have a fire inside without starting one outside. We found some “figs”, too. A first.

The cuttings of culinary sage, Jerusalem sage, licorice plant, and rosemary all seem to be rooting. The English peas are up. I continue to dig out the nandina roots from the front north border where we want to make our screened in tomato patch next spring. Like 2002, I’m madly trying to plant narcissus bulbs I dug up in the summer. This is very late as some of the Narcissus italicus are already sending up scapes. Lots of paperwhite foliage but no flowers.

Read the rest of this entry »

If Austin has received good fall rains, then by November my yard is filled with the first grassy green leaves of false dayflowers. The color is a young, spring green so bright and cheerful that it seems at odds with the season.

False dayflower is a beautiful, but generally uncultivated, member of the Commelinaceae family which includes spiderwort, wandering Jew, and the true, perennial day flower (widow’s tears). Seeds for false dayflower arrived in my garden in a bag of leaves that I collected for mulch. I’m glad they did because their 5-inch tufts of bright green foliage which appear in late fall, brighten the winter garden.

The bright green leaves of false dayflower glow when they catch the sunlight.

Its habit is very similar to its relative, the spiderwort. I consider them far superior to spiderwort because they are shallow-rooted, easy to remove from any spot where they’re not wanted, and have more arresting flowers.

False dayflowers form grass-like drifts that disappear in the first heat of summer. Although they self-sow with the vigor of weeds, they are not rank. They are very shallow-rooted and easy to remove from any place that they are not wanted. They require absolutely no attention and make wonderful filler plants, especially on the edges of shady areas. The seeds sprout in moist soil covered with mulch.

False dayflower massed next to purple heart–another relative.

They are also quite attractive as single plants.

With spring rains the flower spathes shoot up a foot or more and the funny-faced flowers float like pale blue butterflies. Normally, the petals are a solid lavender blue, but occasionally a bitone flower will appear. I’ve selected the bitones seeds over the years and now about 80 per cent of the flowers in my yard are bitoned.

Two colors of false dayflowers growing among purple spiderwort. (Blooming more typically in March.)

I have never seen false dayflower or its seeds for sale. I don’t know anyone else who grows them on purpose. They are weeds. But what wonderful weeds! They are endemic to central Texas so I can grow them without guilt.

Previously, the earliest that false dayflower had bloomed in my garden was December 7, 2001. However, this year it is already blooming. The first flower was October 28th.

Related

Wildflower Center: Native Plant Database: Tinantia anomala (The botanists are playing with names again. I say commelinantia because it took me such a long time to learn to spell it. And because it belongs to the Commelinaceae (Spiderwort) family.