Crazy Woman Next Door

Well, the woman next door has been at it again. Evidently, she doesn't like the way artichokes look, because she has chopped down the plant I had growing next to the fence.

I love the way they look; they're very architectural plants, like giant thistles. I'm hoping that the plant makes it.

It's very frustrating, because it just makes me want to retaliate, and I don't want to be that kind of person. Grr. So anyway, while I was looking online trying to find information on cutting them back to see if mine would survive, I found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5XAfq9FJ-8&feature=related

Which is making me hungry for artichokes!

Fortunately, I have several seedlings planted, so should have some backups even if the artichoke doesn't make it.

ROGUE FLOWERS

One of the things I love about spring and, let's face it, all of the flowering seasons, is that there are always little surprise plants that I'm rooting for.

What I mean is that I'll be driving along, and there by the side of the road, next to an abandoned patch of overgrowth, a cheery patch of daffodils are poking their heads up and nodding in the wake of passing cars.

I always wonder how they got there. Was the overgrowth once a carefully-tended garden that has long since been abandoned? Did a bird or the wind drop a seed/bulb?

I was mentioning this to the boyfriend the other day, and when I got to this point in my thought relating, he stopped me and said, "No."

I, of course, replied, "No what?"

And he said, "No, you are not going to become a terrorist gardener who wanders around planting flowers randomly along roadsides and things."

This, of course, was mostly irritating because of the fact that the next two sentences in my thought train are always: Did a phantom gardener sneak out and plant them when no one was looking? That would be a kind of cool thing to do, come to think of it....

It's perfectly reasonable, of course, to think these things, but completely unfair of him to KNOW that I'm thinking them.

At any rate, these little daffodils and things always make me happy.

In my own garden, things had been untended for so long that many things are there as a result of their own determination to survive, and so I have rogue plants of my own to make me happy. There are cornflowers growing in random places, many of which I've uprooted and moved to a non-middle-of-the-grass location. And the day before yesterday I discovered the most startlingly-blue flower growing up next to the path. It's really small and close to the ground, which probably means that it's not having the easiest time, but it's absolutely gorgeous. I've looked around, and I think it's probably a scilla siberica. I'll take a photo of it later, but its another thing that makes me happy just to see it. I'm either going to move it to a better location or, at the very least, pull some of the grass from around it and help it to grow.

Its leaves are very similar to a bluebell, and the flowers also grow on a kind of arching stem, two per stem so far. I'll definitely take a photo, though, because the flower colour is really amazing.