Oxalis versicolor

The pictures will hardly do these tiny unfurling flower justice. This Oxalis versicolor just opening up in the Warm Temperate Pavilion at Brooklyn Botanic is daintiness personified, as my mom might say. Candy cane oxalis. Just in time for the season. I'm glad I wandered into this pavilion when picking up my last paycheck yesterday.

Oxalis in the Window

Enjoying Oxalis in the window at the Claireware showroom while holiday shopping.

I was worried that with the end of my horticulture internship at Brooklyn Botanic, botanical inspiration would be harder to come by and that I might not achieve the goal of keeping this blog going for a full year. But Susan (http://www.steinbrockdesign.com/) and Claire's (http://www.claireware.net/) craft sale on Sunday provided a nice dose of botanical beauty with some lovely plantings at the pottery studio, some even in handmade pots, like the Oxalis above. Interestingly, there was some butterfly weed blooming still in an outside box. I had no idea that it could hold blooms even after a frost, but perhaps the warm spell we had before this winter weather kept it going. I'm tempted to go back and see how it fares today. As I write this, there are snow flurries in Brooklyn.
















Handpainted scarves by Susan

Oxalis

When I hear the term Oxalis, I usually think of the pretty clover-like weed that I continually pull out of my vegetable beds, a type commonly called creeping woodsorrel or the showy purple shamrock Oxalis triangularis of Caleb's annual border this year. Today, the word means something different to me after seeing Carla's Oxalis collection in the warm temperate greenhouse. One pretty but very persistant weed had soured me (pun intended) on what is a large genus of pretty plants mostly from South Africa and South America, but including some North American woodland natives. I like how there are some without the characteristic clover-shaped foliage and always these beautiful dainty flowers. Seeing them today was a special treat.