Wild about wild petunias

Some of my favorite flowers come from ditches.  When I walk or ride (car or horse) down small roads and streets, I always pay attention to what is growing in the ditches.  Amid the weeds, grass, and trash there are always wildflowers thriving in the mess. 

Much to the embarrassment of my husband and friends, I will stop to rescue a wildflower specimen for my garden.  Those ditch flowers are extremely hardy, exactly the characteristic I am looking for.

Many years ago, I introduced wild petunias to my front garden.  I chose to plant mine in the filtered shade because that is the environment from which I rescued it.  While it has reseeded and spread gently throughout the garden, it has definitely migrated over to the sunnier side of the flower bed, interspersing itself in the liriope border. 


I hope to capture some seeds in order to transfer it to my sunnier gardens in the backyard.  I love observing the way the garden naturally redesigns itself.

Gardens are my heritage

Some of my earliest memories are from my Grandma's garden.  My grandparents were so poor that they still didn't have plumbing in their home and electricity was a new addition to their home.  In spite of her challenging existence, my grandma created beauty in her home and in her gardens with lovely flowers.  While I'm sure she grew others, the flowers I remember as a preschooler were the snap dragons into which I would poke my fingers to be "bitten" by the dragon mouths, and the gladiolas which towered above my tiny stature.

Snap dragons are a winter flower in Alabama and even then I don't have much success growing them.  However the gladiola bulbs from my grandmother's last garden have thrived in Alabama and cross polinated with the other varieties I've purchased.  They have spread themselves across the sunny spots in my backyard.

Of course, now that I'm grown, they no longer tower over my head, but they remind me of the glad days of my gardening heritage in my grandmother's backyard.

A hot mess

One of the solutions for a wet place in a landscape is to create a rain garden.  The idea is that you should embrace the low place, dig it out a little deeper and introduce plants that thrive in a feast or famine environment. 

It seemed like a good idea for the low place in my side yard so I started planting the area with natives that I literally dug from road sides and pass-a-longs from other gardeners. 

At first it was a huge mess because I had to keep it weeded since I couldn't really mulch the area that I wanted to spread and/or reseed. 

Then it became even messier because the plants wouldn't reseed according to my vision of swaths of bright colors.  They continued to insist on reseeding and spreading in random directions all through the bed.

After nearly 10 years the plants have happily spread randomly all through the rain garden according to their own plan.  I've decided to embrace the idea of a brightly colored hot mess.   The color pallet changes almost daily.  Sadly, the photos do not do it justice.