Thursday, November 29, 2007

Metallic Pyramidal Bugleweed

Metallic Pyramidal Bugleweed
Ajuga pyramidalis 'Metallica Crispa'
(a-JOO-guh) (peer-uh-mid-AH-liss)
Synonyms: Carpet Bugle

I got my computer back and I have another hard drive and some more ram. There are now 3 internal drives with 340 GB of storage and a gig of ram. I also bought a 200 GB external Firewire/USB hard drive so I have plenty of storage space now. I was getting sick of trying to manage my storage space but I should be okay for a while. I got the ram because Photoshop CS2 is kind of a ram hog. It seems a little faster. They also put a USB 2.0 card in for me and that is a lot faster plus it has 4 ports, which is better than the two I used to have. I have been moving a lot of files around and I put in 475 songs (all legal, BTW) that I have been waiting to add to Itunes but couldn’t because of the lack of space. I am listening to some new music as I type this. I now have about 4,000 songs in the library and on my Ipod. Someday I swear I going to listen to every one of them. According to Itunes that will take around 14 days.

Pyramidal Bugleweed makes a carpet of color in the spring.

While moving some files around I found some pictures of one of favorite groundcovers, Ajuga. I like groundcovers because they are often a problem solver, don’t take much maintenance and you generally don’t have to mulch them. This clumping form of Ajuga is slowly (compared to A. reptans) but steady spreading and very hardy. You can see a tiny bit of the foliage in the big picture but it doesn’t do justice to the purple crinkled leaves. They are really nice. Now this is a flat plant that is between 1 and 2 inches tall. The flower spikes are a beautiful color and a little taller at 4 inches. It is a wondrous color of carpet in spring. I started out with about 50 plants from very small pots and there are now several large patches of several hundred each. I use it in between some of the cracks in the stone walks. In general Ajuga is an easy groundcover that grows under a variety of light conditions and in both moist and dry soil conditions. There are a few different species and numerous cultivars available. I noticed that there is a little red Japanese Maple seedling in the upper right hand corner of the second picture. I will have to check that out tomorrow and try and save it. This patch of Ajuga has some Forget-Me-Nots that grow in and around it. Too bad I couldn’t get them to bloom together.

White Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis 'Alba') is a handsome, small stature flowering tree.

These pictures were taken on May 20th of this year. I was blown away by the greenness of the different pictures. This is another image from that folder. The Estate has a small collection of Redbuds and one of the best is the White Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis 'Alba'). Here is a little blurb about it from the Missouri Native Plants Website:

"Missouri's greatest gift to springtime gardens is the white redbud," wrote the late Edgar Anderson in a Missouri Botanical Garden Bulletin back in the late 1960s. "In bloom, it is beautiful by day, but only those who have seen it in the light of a full moon know the magic it can bring to a garden." The introduction and distribution of this unusual small tree by the Missouri Botanical Garden remains an outstanding horticultural achievement.

Barbara Perry Lawton
Click here for the rest of the story

5 comments:

Ki said...

I loved the white redbud tree I saw blooming in a nursery but they wanted too much for it. It seemed to be a more graceful tree than the pink flowered ones but that could be because it was dug up and plopped on the bare ground with a mulch covering so the tree was like a large bonsai. You photo makes me wistful thinking about the tree and it's a shame they wanted so much for it.

Anonymous said...

The White Redbud is worth more IMO. It seems to grow with a little better shape and structure. I would highly recommend it. I don't think I will plant plain old Redbuds anymore they will be one of the pink cultivars or white.

Oswegan said...

Wow, those are cool.

~Oswegan

Annie in Austin said...

Hello DFP,

We planted a Texas Whitebud this year - well, it's supposed to be a whitebud but we didn't see it bloom. I hope the tags were right. It was about 8-feet tall and hasn't done much growing yet.

The leaves on Cercis canadensis var. texensis look a little rounder and the texture feels a little glossier than those of regular Eastern redbuds, but they're the same species. It will be great if the blooms on our tree are anything like the white blooms in your beautiful photo.

The Japanese maple leaves look lovely, too - but the white-berried Callicarpa in your earlier doesn't trigger plant-lust at all. Purple is better!

Annie at the Transplantable Rose

i beati said...

these are exquisite what is the camera setting etc.. sk