Design

Among so many things in flower right now, this Spanish Lavender is lovely. Even in a pot, it was great in winter. Now in flower, it's graceful and attractive.

Not all my Spanish lavenders look like this in late January. Most look rather spindly at this point. But, it's hard to beat a plant that looks this good after an usually cold winter. I think it was a 'thank you' from last summer's Master Gardener conference, a cultivar called 'Anouka' maybe (darn, a quick search of previous posts brought all sort of other interesting thoughts about Spanish lavender, but not the source of this one). I'll have to do a more complete search. Spanish lavenders are also tolerant of our humidity, unlike 'English' and 'French' lavenders.

I hadn't rooted cuttings much before, and I thought I'd try some Spanish lavender (lovely flowers most of the summer) and an amazingly hardy red climbing rose in front of the house. (The lavender image is from a fellow blogger from Alabama: somethingthatwontcompute.blogspot.com.) The rose has flowered season after season with no help from us; it scrambles up an old dogwood tree, and then flowers and flowers. Drought didn't stop it; light frosts are shrugged off. It's amazing. We don't water, fertilize, spray -- it's definitely a rose to grow! But since it pre-dates us, and is of no recognizable variety (without doing any research), I thought cuttings would be easy enough to try. So in late summer, I took tip cuttings of the lavender and of the rose (this was in the depths of our dreadful August heat), dipped them in some Rootone that I'd had for awhile, and stuck them in some pots filled with half and half vermiculite and potting mix. I checked them ...