Plumbago Passion

I am very prone to love at first sight. In fact, it happened just last week. I saw a tall southerner “across a crowded room”, as the song says. My heart stood still (as another song says). I was enraptured.

The tall stranger was plumbago (Plumbago auriculata, also known as Plumbago capensis), which is sometimes also known by its extremely unromantic common name, leadwort. I had my rhapsodic moment at Duke Gardens, the glass-enclosed horticultural pleasure ground created by the late heiress, Doris Duke, on her Somerville, New Jersey estate.

Duke Gardens is divided into a series of “rooms”, each representing the horticultural traditions and typical plant materials of a specific region. The divine plumbago was clambering up a trellised wall in the “Southern Colonial Garden”. There may have been little actual shadow in the room, but with its hundreds of blue phlox-like flowers, the plumbago put many of its neighbors in the shade. From a distance, the vigorous climber looked like a billowing blue cloud that all but subsumed the trellis over which it hovered. I knew then and there that I wanted a plumbago of my own.

Returning for a moment to reality, I heard the tour guide say that plumbago grows wild in the American south. This remark gave me the kind of palpitations that infatuated people always get when they encounter bumps on the road to true love. Despite the effects of global warming, the American South and northern New Jersey do not yet share the same climate. My plumbago could live outside in the summer, but would obviously need special accommodations during the gray, depressing New Jersey winter.

Some things in life are not fair. Doris Duke had enough money to dazzle two legged playboys like the notorious mid-century