Mina Lobata

So here we are, Labor Day has passed, so put away your white shoes lest Serial Mom come after you and bludgeon you senseless, even if your name does happen to be Patricia Hearst! It's that inevitable winding down time for outside activities, and if your last few weeks have been like ours have, you're getting regular, steady rains ... ours, unfortunately, keep happening on the weekends, which has kept us from getting much done in the garden. Sure, we continue to harvest tomatoes, the hot peppers are producing like crazy and we can't keep up with all the fiery goodness they've been giving us of late. And, as we watch sadly as most of the flowers fade, thoughts start turning toward the inevitable fall and winter months ... first will come Halloween, the most festive time of year at our house ... then the cold rains that will transition into snow ... yet another stage in the continuing garden cycle ...

But, there's still a lot of life left out there as well! Tonight's post is an example of a vine that has just recently come into its own, showering us with dramatic sprays of multicolored flowers ... this, my friends, is Mina lobata, or "Spanish Flag," a member of the large family of Ipomoea vines (which includes Morning Glories, Sweet Potato vine, Cardinal Climber and lord knows what other species we just don't know about or have in the garden).

Mina lobata was a flower I knew nothing about before this spring, when I spotted a pack of these seeds and was intrigued by the photo on the packet (as I am sure many of us have been seduced this way into planting something). And as I read further, the promise of lovely sprays of flowers starting a creamy white, then fading into orange and eventually red clinched the sale for me! I haven't been disappointed, and hope that these will have time to produce seeds we can collect for planting next year ... if not, I'll be on the lookout for more ...

I planted these at the south base of the old jungle gym (remnants of past owners' children) that sits smack in the middle of our vegetable garden in late May, and they were very quick to germinate and emerge. The first true leaves were a bit of a surprise, as they look exactly like smaller, though darker green, versions of one of our annual favorites, Ipomoea battata (ornamental Sweet potato vine) ... at that point, all I had to do was to be patient until they climbed up and over the rungs and wait for the blooms to appear!

Well, they started blooming in late August and show no signs of slowing down until the weather cools and the sun becomes more scarce ... Though they're not as immediately dramatic as their cousins the Morning Glories, Mina lobata definitely does add an unusual punch of late summer color wherever it's planted. Yes, you do have to get up a little closer to examine them, but isn't that what we die hard gardeners enjoy the most? Getting up close and personal with the flowers as they complete their cycle ... watching wondrously how they mature into blossom and give us their thanks for nurturing them over the summer ... And for a species previously unknown to us, it was an even more exciting cycle to observe ... definitely one we hope to repeat in years to come, whether these examples produce seed of their own this year, or we have to plant anew next year!