Blue Cools in the Summertime
Horticulturists remember this sort of thing: It was a spring weekday. I stopped in to see my friends at Crumps Garden Center north of McKinney, and Joe Crump was excited by a new hanging basket plant that they’d grown. “Neil, it’s from Australia, it’s called ‘Blue Wonder,’ and it’s going to be really special.”
![](https://neilsperry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/5-21-18-Fanflower.jpg)
New Blue Wonder fanflower cools its surroundings in summer.
Nobody grew baskets better than the Crumps, and I bought a couple of the fanflowers totally on Joe’s recommendation. I put them into big patio pots so they could spill out and show off, and that’s just what they did.
I love this plant. Let me count the ways:
• It thrives in the heat.
• I’ve never seen pests on the ones that I’ve grown.
• Blue is such a rare color anyway, especially in summer.
• It sprawls and covers a bed nicely, yet it stays low and compact.
• Newer forms like ‘Improved New Blue Wonder’ and others have even more and better flowers.
![](https://neilsperry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/5-21-18-Blue-and-white-fanflowers-begonias.jpg)
It’s a patriotic blend of colors with white and blue fanflowers along with red waxleafed begonias. Note how much more heavily the blue-flowering fanflower is blooming.
I’ve found fanflower (Scaevola, if you care to use its unglamorous genus name) to do best in rich, highly organic soil. I give mine morning sun and shade from noon on. It just seems like the merciful thing to do for a plant that’s going to have to grow down along the ground where temperatures can be 20 degrees warmer than up where thermometers are hung.
![](https://neilsperry.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/5-21-18-Dahlberg-daisy-fanflower.jpg)
Dahlberg daisies and contrast provide a cheerful contrast in colors, textures. Both deserve more common use.
Fanflowers grow best if they’re kept well fed and consistently moist. Use a high-nitrogen or all-nitrogen fertilizer similar to what you’d use on your lawn and shrub beds. That is, after all, what Texas A&M soil tests show that Texas soils need the most often.
Of you can do as I’ve done so many times over the years: grow fanflowers in decorative pots as your “spiller” flowers, or go back to the way that Joe Crump was growing them – in big, beautiful hanging baskets.