Accidental Beauty

1.  Dinner
Sometimes the most beautiful effects in a garden are completely unplanned.  Here's tonight's supper I collected.  All the regular vegetable-collecting buckets were in use here and there so I grabbed an empty bowl-shaped planter to fetch in these tomatoes, broccoli and beets, together with a cucumber and a few errant green beans.

dinner

2. Volunteers
Here's another accidental beauty--a Jimson weed (Devil's trumpet) in my compost pile.  The seeds have been waiting in the compost pile for at least three years, because that's the last time I grew this plant around here.  Earlier this summer, I shifted the pile to get at some of the older compost at the bottom, which must have exposed the seeds.  Within a week of being exposed, the seeds came to life and the baby plants took off.  These are perhaps eight or ten weeks old, they really exploded in the compost.  This is three plants, only.


 

The blooms open in the afternoon, then die by mid-morning of the next day.  However, a new crop of blooms is waiting, as you see here, to open that afternoon. This photo was taken in the early afternoon when the dead flowers are still on the plant (you can see them drooping) and the new flowers have not yet opened for the afternoon. They look and act like giant morning glories, only they don't climb and their period of blooming in the day is different. The flowers have the same elegant trumpet shapes, although the Jimson weed's are far, far bigger.

3. Nature's flower arrangement
We deadheaded the hostas and the cardinal flowers today.  Several clematis vines were trimmed back last week (It had to be done because of some construction: this is not the usual time of year to prune clematis.)  Combine these with some immortal oak leaves from last winter, and you get a perfectly beautiful composition of colors and textures--prettier than any flower arrangement I've ever made on purpose.

nature's flower arrangement

--TK

PS: Not all the beauty is accidental. Here is an autumnal composition planted on purpose--Black eyed Susans with Perennial Dusty Miller.  A few cardinal flowers show in the background, together with the daisy-like flowers of a Ligualaria. This is a view from the top of the mound which surrounds the bog-garden: the Ligularia and  Cardinal flower are down in the bog, the Black eyed Susans and Dusty Miller are on the dry upland portion.

Fall in the air