One month ago today we woke in our own bed after flying in from Belgium the night before. Only now am I catching up to yardwork, which these days consists of staying ahead of the interlopers in our all-natives garden covering the front yard and hacking away at plants in the back before they can seed. Their days are numbered: two weeks from now we hope to start the replanting of the backyard. I question, at times, why we paid so much to plant perennials which should natively grow here but there ya go. A complete and pleasant shock has been seeing the blue mistflowers explode in size and coverage. These beautiful and late-blooming plants had for years volunteered amid the purple coneflowers I’ve showcased many times on this blog. Most of them were taken out to facilitate the new landscaping plan, but the architect of that plan instructed his crew to transplant as many as possible. Given that it was a week into October, he also sprinkled any seed heads he encountered. I think the much better soil helped them out a little bit:
I had to transplant two which ‘volunteered’ at the edge of the walkway to our front door and by doing so, obstructed most of the sidewalk. One withstood the shock and has many buds on it. The other has stood with severely wilted (but green!) leaves for almost four weeks. I keep telling it, “hang in there! You don’t need to bloom! Just live!”
all the voices in my head 