Native Plant Sale

I went to the fall native plant sale this weekend at Morningside Nature Center with my parents. I bought a mimosa plant, aka Powderpuff (the groundcover, not the exotic invasive tree) to replace the one I killed last year. I love its puffy pink flowers and fern-like foliage.

I also got a passion flower. Passion flower makes me feel giddy inside. Seriously. I think it's the most beautiful flower I have ever seen--it's over-the-top with different textures, bright colors (purple!), and this wild fringe, all calling out exotically to potential pollinators--and I catch my breath every time I see one. Now I have my own! It's a vine that dies back in the winter, so spring will be exciting for me. You know--it's the little things.

Here's a photo of a passion flower that Kim took:


After I paid for the plants, this student-looking guy asked me a couple of questions for a Native Plant Society survey. "Have you been here before?" "Yes." "And how did you hear about the sale? Did you see an ad?" "Uh...I just know about it. It's on my calendar." All of a sudden it became terribly clear to me--I've become a plant dork! When did this happen?!

(So much for giving the blog a temporary rest.)

Free Plants!

Our university department, Environmental Horticulture, is super fun. All the people I work with are great, and I'm not just saying that because this is a work blog.

And one of the other perks of working where we do is that we get sometimes get free plants. There's a gorgeous demonstration garden that's planted a couple of times a year, and the greenhouse people are constantly raising new varieties to plant in the garden. When they're finished with plants for whatever reason--either they have enough of that plant, or they're changing the garden for the season, or some such thing--they send out an e-mail to the entire department advertising free plants.

Whoever sees the e-mail first in our office yells out, "Free plants! Gogogo!" and the rest of us gather our sunglasses and run to our cars to adjourn to the greenhouse. You see, speed is of the essence when free plants are in the offing. Everyone in our department loves plants--especially free plants. Many of them work in buildings a lot closer to the greenhouse than our building, and one never knows how many free plants are available. So it's best to rush over there immediately.

Today we were invited to take winter bedding plants for our gardens. These were tiny plugs of dianthus, snapdragons, pansies, petunias, and violas, some of them with beautiful flowers in purple, pink, white, and yellow already--precocious things!

I have to say, I don't really understand what it is about women and small things--any small thing, even if it's something mundane like a key or a box or an apple or whatever, is always like the CUTEST. THING. EVER. Duly, the women in the greenhouse today (including me) could not help ourselves from exclaiming repeatedly how cute the little plants with their little flowers were.

All that swooning over tiny things caused some kind of plant fever. I went a little overboard and got like 100 plants (in my own defense, they all fit into one small plastic pot). For penance, I'm going to give some to co-workers who couldn't be with us today, and some to my mom. She's a total plant geek.

I will post photos when I figure out where the camera is.