skullcap – variegatagal

The Cherry and Violet Cloud skullcaps are announcing what spring is all about: flower power!

The Cherry (or Pink) skullcap is particularly impressive for its masses of blooms. I’m so impressed with this scutellaria. This is a second year plant and has maintained a nice, tight mounded habit since I first planted it.

The purple blooms of the Violet Cloud isn’t as plentiful as Cherry Pink, but it is still a young plant. While it seems to sprawl a bit more than the Cherry Skullcap, its purple blooms provide great color contrast with the yellows and greens in a flower garden.

I read that scutellaria can be propagated via softwood cuttings, so I’ll be taking a few samples this week to try them out.

We neglected the front yard beds over the height of summer (June-August) and emerged over the Labor Day weekend to perform some maintenance. I spent a couple of weekends in September cleaning up the beds, trimming back some shrubs, and uprooting the casualties. Some plants obviously did not take too well the stretch of 100+ temperatures in August, most noticeably the young azaleas and our Waterfall Japanese Maple. At first we thought the drip line system to blame, but when we had a contractor come out to inspect our sprinkler system, he recommended that the drip system be run a minimum of 20 minutes–much more than the 5 minute run we had originally programmed. Safe to say that the plants are much happier going into Fall.