Friday Fabulous Flower - It's big and blue

Bit of a celebration because internet is back after changing service providers so this is the 1st blog posting using the new tubes.  So far so good, things are working again. Last week's FFF post promised you another late summer flower to pair with the big white fragrant hosta. So here it is the big, blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica).  This plant is pretty easy to grow and the population we have is from seedings. It also flowers over a period of a couple of weeks so it provides some long lasting color, and it's a big plant so it makes its presence known. It used to have Lobelia cardinalis growing along with it, but the big red lobelia does not grow well for us. The specific epithet siphilitica is another one of those old medicinal plant names, but it is also a rather toxic plant, so this is not a smart way to treat your VD. Our glasshouse has Euphorbia antisiphilitica, so maybe this lobelia gives you the disease?  Hard to interpret.