Another little check-in on Rosita for anybody interested. The levels of zoom are a little different, unfortunately, but here's the middle canes, focusing on that red one in the middle, from May 17, May 24, and today, May 31. To show the subtle fading of the red and the growing clusters.
And here's the wide shot comparison between one week ago today and today.
There hasn't been a lot of explosive growth. It's all been very slow. She had an extremely rough week the week before last and is only really now getting to dry out and recover from it.
Here's a cluster of buds from May 25 and then from today. You can see that the buds themselves haven't grown much, but they're separating and the pedicels (stems holding each bud) have elongated and reddened, showing new tissue growth.
I don't lvoe the slight gray sheen on them. But they're also unusually fuzzy, that is, they have a lot of trichomes, and I'm trying to convince myself that it's dust and fuzz from the air rather than mold.
I've had to cut off a few because they were dying. But shes' growing a lot of buds at this point.
You can clearly tell there are still a lot of stressed leaves on her. Leaves don't heal, so those won't get better. All I can do is try to keep taking care of her while she replaces them with better leaves.
I did spray some sulfur on her last Thursday, partly because of all the water she got the week before making me think a precaution against mildew would be wise. And then I actually did find powdery mildew on several of her leaves last Wednesday, which confirmed that another weekly sulfur dose was necessary. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to get a better spray bottle, because the one I have doesn't make a nice even mist. So some leaves aren't getting much sulfur on them at all and some are getting enough to be burned by it. It's not great, but she needs a fungicide to stay healthy right now.
I shouldn't have to explain that the Veranda Lavender has hit a significant milestone this week: her bud opened.
Hesitantly, at first, as you can see in these photos from the 27th and 29th.
But by today, it looks very much like the typical "Veranda Lavender" you can find if you look those flowers up online. It's huge compared to the rest of her. I'm quite surprised. It has very little scent, but that's fine.
She also has another new bud up in her canopy.
It's small, but you can see it in this photo from yesterday.
I mentioned a week ago that I'd needed to prune off a piece of her. There's been a lot of growth around that cut piece.
Which is good, because I had to cut off four more pieces this week as I found even more little black lesions in various other parts.
My working theory at the moment is that she arrived from the nursery with very sensitive and tender growth, weakened further from her week in shipping. There was a massive storm with high winds two weeks ago that I think stressed and made tiny fractures in her in various places, and I was still finding those same lesions as recently as two days ago.
Now, you can probably tell that the lesions in these photos are quite a bit bigger than the dark spots I cut off less than two weeks ago. My hunch is that this is what those dark spots would have turned into. I can't prove it.
I have spent a lot more time since two days ago rifling through her every branch and stem to try and find any more damage that needs to be pruned away. But you can still see from the weekly comparison photos that, thank God, she's outgrowing the pruning I'm doing to her.
I asked my dad after I got her if he had name ideas. I named Rosita myself, and I thought it only fair he have an opportunity to help me name this Veranda Lavender. He suggested a few names, but one that stuck with me was Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn. Her colors are pink, purple, and green.
I pointed out to him that I know a guy, one of my best childhood friends, who decided to name his first biological daughter with his first wife (who had at least one kid of her own from a previous marriage) Aurora. But I don't mind reusing names I've heard before.
I never liked that he named his kid Aurora. He named her after the Disney Princess (Whose name, by the way, was "Brier Rose" in the original Grimm fairy tale). It seemed silly to me. I knew this guy. I knew his wife. Their daughter wasn't a princess. She was just another low-class low-income white kid same as he and I had been.
Maybe she'll rise above her station someday. Hard to say. That friend spent some time behind bars when Aurora was a few years old because his wife accused him of sexually abusing his slightly older stepdaughter. So I'm not holding my breath. He's out now, for whatever that's worth. I don't know if he's involved with his stepkids or his biological kids anymore.
I like to imagine that, someday, when VL has many flowers, in the floribunda clusters she's meant to have, that they really will look like an aurora during a sunset. The light will pass through the petals and scatter across the whole plant, and she will look like she's bathed in pink and purple. It'll be pretty.
So I'll try to start calling her Aurora. It won't be easy. For one thing, I'm still terrified that she could collapse and die. There were so many lesions I had to cut away. I worry she may have a systemic infection. But she's growing. She's blooming. She's doing her best. Parts of her are doing well. Parts of her are not.
That's all any of us can hope for, human or plant, I suppose.