The fun of an unexpected seedling

[gregpresley]

Two years ago (or more, I can't remember), I planted seeds for Euphorbia marginata (snow on the mountain) under an apricot tree, with the idea that the leaves would light up an area of my garden in which root competition made it difficult to work the soil.. Not a single one sprouted, and I have just tromped around the understory of the tree since then, weeding and picking apricots - paying minimal attention to the bits of greenery here and there under the tree. Today while watering by hand, I was concentrating on the struggling rhubarb behind the tree, when all of a sudden my eye caught a flash of brilliant variegation on some foliage under the tree - and there was a full-grown euphorbia in all its glory. It reinforced the notion I have always had, that seeds have a timing all their own - and self-sown seedlings have a way of picking the perfect environment for themselves - which ensures that I have alyssum every year in certain areas, calendula in others, and cosmos elsewhere..

[Lee]

i agree... have things coming up randomly and many of them I can't remember ever having planted, some of them i planted summer before last and can't remember what they are as by now the ID labels have vanished. My daughter who lived 2 nd a half blocks away and I both had a bunch of plants with huge flat leaves at the base the large stalks coming up like a minosa candlabra with smaller leaves and then small mallow like blooms going up the stalks progressively, some as tall as

5 feet! Must have been a bunch of blackbirds with diarrhea planting them! leo/lee