A Tale of Two Weeds

One day, a month or so ago, Saint Gene and I were out and about in the back yard admiring the small little impatiens plants that he had grown from seed and planted under one of our big trees. I noticed two weeds that seemed to be growing from beans and knew they weren't impatiens. When I pointed them out to Saint Gene he immediately pulled them out of the ground and tossed them aside. We really didn't want weeds to compete with our wonderful new little plants. On a impulse I decided I wanted to see what the weeds would grow up to look like and I talked Saint Gene into putting them both in a single plastic pot in some potting soil. By this time they had been out of the ground, laying with the roots exposed for about an hour. They obviously weren't going to make it but seeing as they were weeds anyway, it didn't matter. And being weeds they defied the odds and managed to perk up over the next few days. So we laughed, placed them in an out-of-the-way spot on the deck, watered them and left them alone. They straggled up into the sun with very little help from us. They were certainly not very attractive but they were determined to grow. Their skinny but sturdy little stalks kept on going up and their sparse little leaves got brown on the tips but managed to survive. And this is how one those weeds paid us back for our efforts:


A beautiful, beautiful sunflower. The second weed will probably open it's flower in about a week. We are guessing that the sunflower seeds were carried from the bird feeder by birds and dropped over the tilled flower bed which had been prepared for the impatiens.  I really don't know what it was that made me want to grow two weeds. But I'm sure glad I did.

Joy Journal: Bright yellow