Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010
My Mom loves gardening, and has build up a rather impressive amount of plants over the years. She’s also rarely around during summer, heading off to far away (and much cooler) places for a month or more. And she’s got some health issues that mean she’s not at all reliable when it comes to maintaining her garden even when she’s here. Put together, this means she’s not exactly going for the standard set of plants.
Annuals, well, only a few, and only if they’re cheap. Stuff that keeps coming back year after year means she has a lot less of her garden to fill in each spring.
And nothing that blooms in high summer. She’s not around to see it anyway. Her garden peaks in late spring.
Forget any that can’t handle being crowded by weeds, too. None of the rest of the household has any inclination towards weeding, not even to keep the place looking pretty while she’s gone. The large quantities of mulch Mom uses help keep them down, but things grow voraciously around here.
Oh, and thanks to the quirks of our place, all her gardens are at least partially in shade, and a lot of the yard is always in shade. That cuts out about 60% or more of the options, since so many of the prettiest flowers need sunlight. And our ground is heavy on the clays, too, and it takes a lot of work to adjust the soil to match finicky plants. Which means easy to grow is the way to go.
And of course, there’s the personality factor. My mom likes variety in her plants, and enjoys the oddballs for their interesting shapes and colors.
Add it all up, and you get a garden where I don’t have a chance of naming most of the flowers. It’s not your standard roses and petunias and pansies, it’s bleeding hearts and rice cake plants and tiger lilies and oh so many daffodils. Daffodils grow very well in Mom’s garden, it’s the perfect soil and maintenance patterns for them, wouldn’t you know.
But well, between the obscure plants and my own indifference towards flowers, I haven’t a clue what this one is. I’m sure Mom will comment with the name, she tends to do that, so if you need to know there’s that. But to me, it’s just a pretty yellow flower made up of lots of little flowers. Which works fine for me, it’s just as beautiful without a name.
Looks like a lantana in the flowerbox. One of the few annuals I buy, because they manage to survive being in an unwatered flowerbox. And they look awesome.
You said, “None of the rest of the household has any inclination towards weeding, not even to keep the place looking pretty while she’s gone.” Once about 4 years ago, I weeded one of the flowerbeds after I performed another chore in the front yard (laying down fresh mulch, perhaps). With such variety in flowers, it is difficult to tell a unique flower not in bloom from a weed. Your mother raged at me for pulling out half her flowers.
Later she actually inventoried the flowerbed and determined that I had pulled out only one flower. But I had learned my lesson: never weed the flowerbed.
Yup, that’s a decent part of why I don’t weed Mom’s garden. Though I do pay attention when she buys plants, so I have a higher chance of recognizing what’s a flower and what’s a weed.
Mostly, though, it’s my dislike of working in the dirt and sun (or, well, partial shade) for long hours.