Plant Portrait - Strawberry Spinach

I am growing this vegetable for the first time this year.  It is supposed to be an heirloom vegetable that has been grown for centuries . Although it is called spinach, it is, in fact, a chard (Chenopodium capitatum).

Strawberry Spinach

Echo of Miss Havisham

You, no doubt, remember Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations. The day she was to be married Miss Havisham learned she had been jilted by the man she loved, so she decided to spend the rest of her life in her wedding gown, never changing a thing in the house, including the wedding breakfast table holding the decaying wedding cake. There is a garden in our area that makes me think of Miss Havisham. That garden was built on a grand scale and is very attractive in its faded  grandeur.

Blue and Yellow

Continuing my review of plants by the colour of what is in bloom, I have decided to cover yellow and blue together, in the way I recently did for red and white. I begin with what I consider the best plant I became acquainted with last year,  the half-hardy annual: Calceolaria mexicana. You simply collect seeds in the fall and plant them the next spring, a few weeks before the last frost.

Calceolaria mexicana

Red & White

I continue with my series on blooming by colors. In my last post I did the pinks. I decided this week to lump the reds and the whites together.  Here are some of the plants blooming red or white just now.

Rose Dortmund

Pink

I thought I would do a few posts on what is in bloom just now, selecting plants by colour. I am starting with pink. Because so far we have had a relatively cool (as well as very wet) summer, many of the things that normally would have finished blooming some time ago (for instance, peonies) are still looking good. Here are a few examples of what is in bloom in pink at Roche Fleurie. Of course, roses make up the majority of the pink blooms.

John Davis rose