Minutiae
May 13th, 2008 by Kristin Green
It’s all about the little things again. Yesterday Gail spotted an adorable flock of Cedar Waxwings feasting on inchworms and pooping on me (nailed twice, lucky me!) and today Gioia spied the Oriole sweetly serenading as we weeded the Display Garden. I was also lucky enough to spot this little guy today hunkered down against the wind (it’s blowing a gale out there!). Anyone know if it is what it looks like? – I think it must be a new baby dragonfly. (click on pictures for a larger view)
We’re shifting our focus this week from planting to weeding.
It happens every year like a bomb went off – last week’s rain sparked a flash flood of seedlings that are all of a sudden big enough for us to name (with names like “a weed” and “not-a-weed”).
It takes practice to recognize the wants and the don’t wants and patience to extract them from each other. Some of us would like to take a hoe and wipe out the whole lot and start fresh but others of us enjoy the surprises and the challenge. 
The cutting garden is full of volunteer annuals (and we love our volunteers almost as much as we love our volunteer weeders) like Snow on the mountain (Euphorbia marginata), Bupleurum, Papaver somniferum ‘Peony Flowered’ and in the North Garden we came across some cosmos and bachelor buttons amongst our usual thugish favorites like Milkweed (Asclepias). 
Occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, even we don’t recognize a weed when we see it – Gail sighs, “Professional horticulturists that we are…” and shakes her head in dismay. We let some things become specimen-sized before we yank them out with a hot blush of embarrassment (“yikes! Hope nobody noticed that!”) or we’ll miss something completely until it’s a suddenly giant horsy thumb poking up out of the back row. We hope that visitors see the humor too… How well do you know your seedlings?
May 14th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
I know my weeds here *fairly* well… but not so well that I wasn’t secretly relieved to hear that some slip past you and Gail, too. If you professional horticulturists miss a few, than it’s okay for us rank amateurs to miss a bunch!
Kim, We’re all in the same boat – learning as we go along, amateurs or not. Trouble is some of us (I speak for myself) have a mind like a sieve and forget as we go along! (I suspect our mystery weed is a Rudbeckia triloba – I seem to have bunches of them at my house too…) -kris
May 15th, 2008 at 6:08 am
I still have hesitation on pulling some seedlings. I am usually wrong and it isn’t a good plant. Sometimes those weeds seem to get huge overnight, don’t they?
Sometimes it seems like all I have to do is blink – I swear that giant weed wasn’t there a minute ago!… -kris