But sometimes something so serendipitous happens that I just have to share it. Here is a spontaneous garden container.
I neglected to clean out and put away this pot that was the home for a beautiful hibiscus last year. I had nothing else planted in the pot. At all. And this spring, some pansies have self-seeded. Then, hot dog and holy moly! A small sunflower seems to have sprouted from among the dead hibiscus stems. I was so intrigued by the whole thing, I have just let it go to see what happened.
And now, I rather like it.
What about that? I have an automatic garden! What if everything were this easy?
Hi! I'm Robin Ripley author of Wisdom for Home Preservers, published by Taunton Press. I am also co-author of Grocery Gardening. Bumblebee is about my life in rural Maryland, my garden and my love of food, my little dogs and pet chickens. You can follow me on Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. Thank you for visiting!
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I was too lazy to clean up my containers too so I found out that many of the herbs I thought would die in a hard freeze here in glazed pots in CT overwintered instead. So I feel like I found an herb garden. Unfortunately I didn’t cut back anything, so the new growth is all high on bare stems, but beggars can’t be choosers.
What a lucky find!
Your automatic garden is even color-coordinated! Lucky you, Robin … leaving a pot unwatched here produces mainly pecan tree seedlings, from nuts buried by squirrels.
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
Serendipitous, indeed. I think you have to have two qualities to enjoy these unplanned happy moments in the garden: a willingness to let things go a little wild sometimes and the attentiveness to observe the results.
To more happy surprises…
How come this never happens to me? All I ever got was an Italian Parsley plant. (It did make my meatballs taste good last summer.)
Don’t you just wonder how some things come about naturally? Natural wonders is Friday’s blog topic!
Like I posted a little while ago, we are just NOT in charge!!! I had a hibiscus, grapes and a Gerber daisy come back from the left-for-dead. Maybe it’s ok if we ignore our stuff sometimes?!
Surprises are so nice-and your blog is nice too!
Not only can you enjoy the sunflower-your birds will enjoy the seeds in the fall! I’m glad you didn’t pull it out Robin.
It’s so funny the way things can work out. I believe that a lot of great ideas are just mistakes that work out in a way that nobody envisioned. I manage an all organic NYC landscape company. While on location atone of our larger properties, we planted about 100 large planters with ageranthemums. The next year we noticed that they had seeded into the crevices of the pavers. The New Year’s growth had created a beautiful, lush carpet of purple flowers.
Evan Santi
President
Urban Plantscapes
I love it! Volunteers. 🙂
[…] around the birdfeeders grow instead of mowing them down. It also happened once before in an oddly pretty and serendipidous container arrangement that also included some hearty pansies that […]