Color

I'm no expert, I'm not wealthy (the wife of a school teacher), and I'm greenhouseless. So my gardening adventures are often on the cheap. Every once in a while I splurge, in a cheap way.

This spring I splurged and bought some more begonia tubers

(This is one of my originals)

to help fill out the ones that wintered over. I bought them on sale, towards the end of the planting season, from the local garden store where they are sold as singles from open boxes in racks.

(one of the new ones purchased this spring)

hmmm I must have gotten there after some child decided to rearrange the tubers. While I would have bought a tuber for a begonia colored anywhere from red to coral, white would not have been my choice. Especially for these baskets (why are they called baskets?)

(me getting stung and saying words I ought not)

Ow, sack of stinking horse manure that hurt.

While taking the picture of the white begonia, I stuck my hand in the close proximity of a wasp nest and they decided that they did not appreciate it so one of them was sent out to give me a message. Holey moley that stinking hurt. Here is another basket with yet another white begonia in it. Clearly they were well mixed up.

On the subject of color in the garden, I made two poor purchases this year. One I just looked at the picture on the tag. The other was purchased based on the name, description and the pic.

Cascade fuchsia according to the pic on the stick would be a lovely addition to my window boxes next to my cook's porch door. I try to avoid pinkie, lavendery colors next to my yellow with red trim house. So I saw the pic of a red fuchsia and snatched up several. Well admittedly I should have read the description, not that color names are always accurate but I certainly would have avoided anything with rosey in the description just on the off chance that it was really rosey, which these are. Not that I wouldn't have bought them to hang in my trees, just not in my window boxes. Next year I will just use Willy Tamerus or Orange Drops, two plants I have had now for a couple of years and I know what color they are.

The other color disappointment is a clematis that was called Cardinal Rouge. Now I realize that rouge could be any number of various reds. But come on, any catholic girls worth her salt knows that cardinal red is red. Not violet.

(Between bloom cycles but this petal gives you a clear picture of the color)

I expected red from the picture (the tag was accidentally thrown out) and most certainly red from the name. Funny when I googled this color variety of clematis it most certainly shows the color it turned out to be. However I don't carry my laptop with me to the garden store to research the clematis they have. I tend to trust tags.

Its really okay though. I put it in a pot with some of my funny colored pansies and put it over by my old log barn and it looks just fine. It all works out okay in the end and I've never gotten completely rid of a plant that didn't work out where I had intended it to be.

The trick will be for me to tag the white begonias so they can be potted up with themselves for another place in the scheme of things.