I was admiring the blue ginger that is blooming this week so much,  and so intently was I watching for a good shot of the large tiger swallowtail butterflies that have been coming by, that it took me a minute to realize that I wasn’t the only creature admiring the exotic blue-purple  flowers.

The plant is technically not a true ginger but Dichorisandra thyrsiflora, a Brazilian relative of our old familiar native wildflower called Spiderwort, but in form the leaves and tall stems look very much like a common landscape ginger, though the flower spikes look out of this world. 
The flowers here are best described as light violet, or, if you’re an artist, a blend of dioxazine purple and titanium white, with a hint of alizarin in some stems, but this of course varies depending on the light and surroundings. In the right place they often look startlingly blue, almost cobalt, and appear when there is very little blue to be seen in the garden, so they are very welcome. We certainly felt blessed when a neighbor gave the plant to us.

But that frog… it’s a bit of an artist too, and its body, a sort of canvas. Many frog species can alter their skin color to match their surroundings to one degree or another, but alas, purple isn’t in this little fellow’s repertoire. Even if it was, we would probably still miss spotting it, because when rushing around we seldom take the time to admire or wonder about the beauty we have all around us. 

One of my first encounters with these usually unseen singers from the trees was when my family were sitting around the supper table in a little shack or farm house in the Ozarks. Just after we has said our prayer and were preparing to pass around the bowls of food, a tree frog launched itself from a tree outside and into the house through a broken window pane, landing with a big splash in a bowl of cucumber slices floating in a vinaigrette salad dressing. It quickly scrambled up onto a cucumber slice as if it were as natural a place to be as a lily pad, and sat there looking as if it was accustomed to getting itself in and out of life’s big pickles. “I’ve got this!”

—— Susan A. Walton