Gardening with gomphrena,
the garden polka-dot,
tunes me in to smallness:
obvious it’s not.
It’s called a button flower,
but what we see is bract
that shouts in brazen scarlet
I am BIG compact!
Tantara! it blazes,
refusing to be shy,
fanfare for itself,
scalding to my eye.
August 26, 2020 at 11:12 am
Eye candy for all to enjoy. 🙂 Hope you are well on this Wednesday and enjoying maybe some nice feathered friends visiting your pond. 🙂
August 26, 2020 at 12:33 pm
Thanks, Judy! Eye candy indeed! The pond remains deserted except for a few lethargic fish. It’s OK if the geese never come back, but I do miss the ducks and herons, not to mention the songbirds. Apparently the birds also went into lockdown. I hope you are well too. This is a real struggle.
August 26, 2020 at 12:54 pm
One of my favorites, but I grow the orange, of course. Back when I had an herb farm in southern Indiana, we’d end each late summer day by picking 100 bunches of gomphrena (50 stems each, single color bunches of red, orange, purple, pink and white or sometimes mixed bunches at the end when the pickings were slimmer) to hang in the barn loft to dry!
August 26, 2020 at 1:22 pm
I can only imagine the beauty of all those dried polka-dots! What a way to end a summer! I’ve never grown gomphrena before and I’m delighted with this color. I had read that it is exceptionally good for drying and I’m going to try. I won’t have 100 bunches of 50 stems, needless to say, but I might have a few. Is there a best time for cutting them?
August 28, 2020 at 6:26 pm
The word ‘gomphrena’ is funny on the eye, but the flower is perfect, especially against the gaura (one of my favourite summer flowers). Brazen flower would be a much better folk name than button flower.
August 28, 2020 at 7:04 pm
Well, we are folk. So we can call it brazen flower! Almost anything would be better than “gomphrena”!