My Desert Garden

I planted sunflower seeds in February, and promptly forgot all about them.  

Once they arrived at the nursery, I filled my basket-on-the-post container and the 2 little make-the-post-look-less-awkward pots beneath it with purple and yellow  pansies and violas and verbena

and calibrocha and the remains of an osteospermum which never quite took off no matter where I relocated it until it began to thrive atop the post. 

It was a lovely, if static, arrangement, requiring little maintenance, doing nothing, just sitting there, looking lovely.  And then, large leaves began to appear in one of the little pots.  I'd distributed all kinds of seeds quite liberally over the season; I wasn't sure what would develop.

I found out soon enough.  Those seeds were powerful stuff, producing clusters of blooms and soon-to-be-blooms and thinking-about-it blooms

all the way up, at every juncture of leaf and stem. 

There are a lot of nodes getting ready to sprout; that's a lot of sunflowers.  I watch the flowers follow the sunshine, the younger ones attempting to assert themselves over the bigger and more established first born.

This looks like a very interesting conversation, albeit in a language unfathomable to me. 

Actually, it's the newer blooms facing the setting sun, shoving the older one aside.  Survival of the fittest and all that, but I still found myself humming Old and In The Way and commiserating, all while reveling in the unexpected burst of activity in my little corner of heaven.

I've shared the space with a hummingbird and a family of quail. I've watched the flowers open and the centers change shape and color. Every day, there's something new, something more, something less, but always, there is something else.  

All because of some forgotten seeds.