Another of my plant crushes passed overhead as I began Through the Garden Gate on Saturday. This tree with the dangling bunches of pealike flowers is the kind that, when in bloom, makes you crane your neck back, look up, and say Oooh! It was one of the first trees on my wish list when I began to learn about gardening: the black locust tree called Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Purple Robe’ (along with other synonyms).

It’s gosh-durned pretty, and a fairly tough customer to boot. Takes just about any kind of soil conditions and even tolerates drought. But it can be a suckering pest, too, according to the inexhaustible botanical resource Mobot (sometimes their pages are slow to load; be patient). So it’s probably good for this shady gardener that it requires full sun.

P.S. Subtitle this post: On social media, never promise to do anything unless you’ve already done it. My post-a-day promise for Garden Days was promptly broken by heated intervention (aka a hot weekend with too much happening and then too many fires on workdays). But the posts I’d planned to write will be coming. Sometime… soon, I hope!