365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Purple When Purchased
Day 335: It was a pretty lavender colour when I bought it. I swear it was. I would not have bought a pink-flowering heather (or a pink-flowering anything else for that matter because I despise pink). It was a nice shade of greyish lavender, the colour one expects heather to be. Maybe it's the pH of my soil, although acidic soils generally influence flowers toward the blue end of the spectrum, as anyone who's ever tried to grow a pink hydrangea in western Washington will know all too well. Maybe it's taking up some of the red dye in the bark mulch I laid around it. That seems a more likely explanation. In any event, when I put in new plants this last spring, I added not one but two pots of heather. The second one isn't quite as rosy, but it's definitely not the same purple it was when I put it in the ground.
Labels:
bark mulch,
colour change,
gardening,
heather,
pH,
pink
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