The streetside flowers here are all purples and pink. The silverleaf nightshade, Solanum elaeagnifolium is everywhere, yellow eyed in lilac and wavy margins among building sites and verges. Bituminaria bituminous scrambles gently furred leaves, downy silver beneath kaleidoscope flowers almost over in the early summer sun.
The scabious waves stem straight and lavender above it all, with Malva syvestris edging to pink and bleached out Centranthus ruber, cerise and leggy. A deadnettle perhaps, or black horehound mounds under the olive trees with white butterfly clouds.
Chicory leaves look like paperchain men or ancient relics, gently spined midrib and margins sap leaking white latex. The purple flowers dried papery and blue, stamen curling like eyelashes. Oenothera is showy and ornamental and spills out of front gardens all pale pink flowers above kinking blue grey stems.
Nerium oleander pink vividly in central reservations and motorway sidings, and albizia, frothy pink and yellow, canopies among raining lines of leaves. Gul-i-abrisham, the flower of silk.
a year in the garden 