Dear Reader,
“Bloom where you are planted.” It’s a well-known idiom offered by the Bishop of Geneva, Saint Francis de Sales. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t referring to gardening, but it’s one of the rules I live by when I’m deciding what stays in my garden and what needs to go.
When I first moved to Florida (after living in Wisconsin for 30 some years), it was quite a shock when I looked at the plants growing in my yard. I only recognized ferns, rose bushes, and a loner, pink impatiens plant with spindling, spent stems. My new home had been vacant and unattended for a few months and all the other plants looked like jungle vegetation, because they were extremely overgrown.
So with a book about how to identify Florida plants propped up in front of me, I had to be the judge: what was a weed, what had to go, and what could stay. I yanked, pruned, planted and fertilized, but I didn’t always follow the author’s recommendations. Because If you looked around my garden today, you’d find a few weeds amongst the "real" flowers. I’ve decided, some “weeds” are just too pretty to get rid of. (Who knows, maybe they were labeled weeds incorrectly years ago?) And if a flower has decided to grow where it shouldn’t, through the crack in the bricks of my front steps, I marvel and I let it be. Because despite all odds, that plant has taken the Bishop's words of wisdom to heart: “Bloom where you are planted.”
To see some of my plants that are growing in unexpected places (pretty soon I’ll have to stop using the front steps to my house), click here.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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