Suddenly, Cerulean

I'll admit it: Cornflower was my least favorite color in the 64 Crayola box. Bluebirds, sky blue, the Virgin's traditional celestial mantle. I always gazed on them, each, with the smallest amount of skepticism. I was drawn to the earth tones: moss on oak bark, sandstone flecked with iron, the hull of a buckeye.

In a Maine salvage shop, the Virgin's celestial robe. In the "Art of Painting," Francisco Pacheco decreed, no other hue would do.

Something about that particular hue of blue was too unsubstantial, wafty, perhaps even, insipid.

But no more. Lately, I am startled, I am stunned, when I encounter, suddenly, cerulean.

Emerging from the dank cell of a Philadelphia trolley tunnel, I look up. Philadelphia's great Victorian pile of a City Hall, against a suddenly cerulean sky. The sky blue city flag, so hued by old Swede settlers, flaps briskly in a stiff breeze. When I boarded that trolley above ground in West Philadelphia, that same sky was dark and foreboding.

That's the thing about cerulean. It can come right at you, seemingly from no where. Especially, in the garden, where the greens and reds and golds fight it out for supremacy.

On a soupy July afternoon in the sunny perennial border, regal spires of blue Delphinium startle with a hue unlike any other in the garden that day.

At the estate, an ancient clematis decorates, reliably, an equally aged gate post every summer, its hue perfect against peeling white painted stone and silvery Stachys byzantina.

Nigella damescena, or Love-in-A-Mist, is the rare flower whose botanical and common names are equally lovely. A packet of seeds for this cottage annual, from the corner hardware store, tossed casually in unforgiving soil, will reward in perpetuity with lacy foliage and ethereal blue flowers that volunteer year after year. In my vegetable garden it startles always with the unlikely crevices and perfectly placed cracks in brick pathways in which it finds to seed itself.

At the estate garden in fall, it is the blaze of scarlet and crimson that steals the show. But in a sunny patch of the woodland garden, tall rangy spires of Aster tataricus, Tatarian aster, are just the right subtle counterpoint of steely blue.

In all seasons, even in winter, hues of blue have their place. A calm resting place for a busy eye, florist's blue hydrangea is a startling, welcome relief in the Longwood Gardens hothouse, a break from halls decked with red and green and gold.

So, there is something about cerulean. This past year, whether jogging along the river trail at Philadelphia's cliffside Water Works Garden, after the sky suddenly shifts, or for the brief periods most of these rare blue flowers alight the garden, I have a new appreciation for this celestial hue.

After a long, cold, gray winter, hiking the craggy sandstone cliffs of my native Cuyahoga Vally, I ascend the canyon walls. And, there, suddenly, a blue sky over trunks of silvery beech and still naked oak, clinging to their rugged sandstone foundation. The sun's rays warm the soil on the magic days before leaves unfurl, ephemerals will soon grace these craggy canyon walls.

In planning my gardens, I try always to remember the magic of sudden cerulean. But there is only so much one can plan, the best cerulean moments are serendipitous. At the estate, the owners surprised me with a polished silvery chair from Akron artist Don Drumm. We placed it in a neglected part of the garden, in front of a less than ideal chain link fence on a recently reseeded lawn. It brightens this dismal corner quite well.

And then, suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, through the salt hay of a newly planted lawn, Scilla siberica, Siberian squill, emerges faithfully, as it does every year. Against the artist's silvery chair and under a dismal March sky, it was just the right thing. Unexpected, brief, startling. The magic of sudden cerulean.