Greg's mystery garden Erysimums

Gardening home page Gardening links Gardening diary Mystery plants Garden photos, by date Greg's home page

This is one of many pages describing plants and animal life that we have in our garden. In many cases, we don't know what they are. Comments welcome.

By default the photos on this page are relatively small (“thumbnails“). Click on them to get progressively larger photos.

We found this flower in a flower bed. It grows well with enough water, and spreads via the roots. In early June 2008 we planted a lot of cuttings directly into the ground as a ground cover. Since then we have identified it as an Erysimum, also known as wallflowers. It's probably the Bowles mauve cultivar or something similar.

Later we identified the following one, which appears to be the same except for the colour of the flowers. One of them is quite a substantial bush, so it's not clear that the use of them as ground cover is very appropriate. From a Gardening Australia page, it appears to be Erysimum cheiri, Fair Lady Strain.

Thanks to Laurel Gordon for putting me on the right track on this one.

The mystery of Erysimum colours

In winter 2008 we transplanted a number of Erysimum bushes. In particular, I transplanted the bush shown above. In the process, broke off a relatively large branch, so stuck it in a vase, where it continued to flower—with completely different colours:

Instead of variegated brown and yellow, there are now pure yellow flowers, looking much more like the base Erysimum cheiri, and others that are bluish, more like another bush which we've identified as the Bowles mauve cultivar, the one shown at the top of the page. I had thought it might be related to sap pH or some such, and put both a blue and a yellow petal in some vinegar overnight, but there was no change in colour. Very puzzling. Maybe it has something to do with the sunlight.

$Id: erysimum.php,v 1.7 2008/08/06 00:19:30 grog Exp $