If purple is the color of royalty, I am living in a kingdom! My garden is wave after wave of shades of purple from 10 different kinds of spring blooming plants. Ranging from fuchsia to violet, from lavender to grape, my garden makes me think of the Jimi Hendrix song, “Purple haze was in my brain….”
The backbone of my spring garden is, and always has been, the incomparably abundant and beautiful creeping blue phlox. I can’t understand why everyone does not plant this in mass profusion. It is everything you could want from a plant: perennial, semi-evergreen, abundant without being invasive, beautiful flowers that last 3 – 4 weeks, early blooming, easy to grow, maintenance free……shall I go on?
In and amongst the phlox are other native plants. Virginia bluebells are a bit past their prime by now but still offer gorgeous purplish blue bell shaped flowers accented with bright pink. Another “Virginian” is Tradescantia virginiana, spiderwort, which, though native, CAN become overly aggressive so I put the vast majority of these in the back where I have little else planted. Of course our small and slightly invasive purple violet is everywhere. I’m not sure whether my little forget-me-not is native or not. It looks very similar to the mountain forget-me-nots of the American West but I’m pretty sure my woodland plant hails from England. It is an annual but reseeds so freely that I always have a large number of them popping up in unexpected places throughout the garden.
Spiderwort 
Forget me nots
Virginia bluebells 
purple violet
Other purples in my garden are definitely non-native but are welcomed never-the-less. Pansies are putting on a great show in the planter boxes, thrift is spilling over the rock wall while ajuga creeps down the hillside with brilliant spikes of purple flowers. Scilla and grape hyacinth both come from bulbs that have now spread remarkably well under the branches of deciduous trees.
Pansy 
Thrift 
Grape hyacinth 
Ajuga 
Scilla
I wish my 3 year old grandson, George, could see my garden because he has always, throughout his young life, loved purple. When I called Oregon to speak to him on the phone over the weekend , I told him about all the purple flowers in my garden and he said, “I don’t like purple anymore. I like pink!”
Ha. I’m not falling for that one! As soon as I plant a pink garden, he’ll like yellow. Nope, I’m sticking with purple. I love my kingdom.