Cold Climate Gardening

She says, he says
She says: “Mom, you’d better cut that plant back. It’s blocking the entrance to the house!”
He says: “What gorgeous color! Don’t touch it! I’d be happy to inconvenience myself for that plant!”
I have this dilemma just about every year. To chop or not to chop. Many years ago, I ordered a packet of Malva sylvestris subspecies mauritiana ‘Bibor Felho’ from Thompson & Morgan. The best of the original plants attained shrub-like proportions, with blossoms three inches across. Those plants died after the first year, being more of an annual than a perennial for me, but every year since then new plants have grown from seed.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Over fifteen years ago, my very first plant order had an error in it. I had ordered coral bells (Heuchera) and I was sent Heliopsis ‘Summer Sun’ instead. The mail order nursery very quickly remedied their mistake, sending me the coral bells and advising me to keep the false sunflower. Great, I thought, free plants.

Only, I really don’t care for that yellow-orange color that all the plant catalogues call “gold,” but to me looks like no jewelry, cheap or otherwise, said to contain that precious metal. Being a long-time fan of the adage, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” I tried to think what I could do to make the color more pleasing to me, and thus was born the Purple-and-Gold bed.

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Mr. Hinsley, the publisher of the Malvaceae Info site that I mentioned in my previous post, emailed me concerning the meaning of Bibor Felho, and addressed himself to other statements in my blog entry that I didn’t bring up in the email. He is better at search engine use than I am. He searched on bibor and felho individually, something that I neglected to do. He discovered that the words were quite common on Hungarian websites, so he looked them up on a Hungarian-English online dictionary and came up with ‘Purple Cloud.’ He notes, “Felho is correctly spelt, in Hungarian, with an accent on the o. (I think the accent is a double acute accent, also known as …

Popularity: 3% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]