A Slice of Spring

Taken at Chicago Botanic Garden, a section I love with the soft colors of new spring growth.

They look like bubbles!! And that ocean of green with purple is beautiful! A delicious scene to the eyes.

Like a beautiful vitrage...you've captured it perfectly for the banner.

Lovely plantings, wonderful photo, and mighty fine slice.

It looks so cool and refreshing! Excellent banner, Nancy.

Love that! Looks like you could go for a swim through the blues and greens and white…

Beautiful banner Nancy!

Oh my goodness! What a beautiful banner! That place looks idyllic. 😍
A beautiful banner!

Very pretty banner - great job!

A lot of amazing banners from Chicago Bot. Gar. That garden must be heaven on Earth!

Excellent composition. Very evocative.

A river of blooms!
Spectacular banner.

Thank you, everyone! I think this first image is the exact one I took the banner from. And the other is just a more zoomed out view of the same area. It's a lovely area with the natural crushed stone walkways in that section, and the new green growth was the perfect color against the lavender and alliums (at least I think it's lavender and alliums).

wonderful banner Nancy - looks so 'pillowy' The white alliums are my favourite but what is that swath of amazing blue to the right?

It has to be either lavender or a type of salvia. I have several perennial salvias that are that exact color and that blooms in spring. It can tend to look more bluish instead of the purple they claim, but mine are definitely more on the blue side.

Edit: Actually, before the blooms fully open up, the salvia does look more purple, but once most of the flowers open along the tall spike, it looks more blue.

Do you have any closeups of the salvias?

I'm always amazed at how lush things grow there in Chicago, and in the
north east, after such harsh (to me) winters, and in fact may even
need the cold.

Sorry, no close up, and they're pretty much done blooming for now. I'm going to try cutting them back, I've read that can sometimes force a 2nd bloom. It's just been too hot to do anything unnecessary in the yard the past week though. I did upload a pic to the database of them:



Edit: DaylilySLP did actually upload a closeup of the blooms to the database that I just found:

Salvia looks a good candidate.

Because they looked so blue in the banner, I thought they were young nepeta, but am liking the salvia notion because of posture. Yet they are very blue and not so much violet or purple. What's to the left? Iris was my notion.

I think you're right about the iris towards the left where the color is definitely darker. Other pics taken from the same area show the iris I think it is, Crested Iris, or Iris Tectorum, that I made a banner out of last month. I think the color variation between blue and purple has more to do with time of day, sun or shade, or just auto color balance a camera used. If you look at the photos on the iris page, there's a wide range of color variation there as well.