It’s been a weird year weather-wise, not that every year doesn’t have peculiarities.  A long cold and wet Spring, now seeming to flash into high heat, still humid.  Usually one morning in early July I walk around the house and take pictures of things that are growing.  This is the first year I’ll put them out like this, but better than stuffing people’s mailboxes.

There’s always a platycodon picture, but this year they’re late, so all we have is a bud.

There are daylilies here, if not oceans of them at least a whole lot, enough to keep squadrons of pollen hungry bugs busy for a long time.  Two below are noted for color.

Also a colorful patch below, of echinacea, cosmos, tiger lily, sempervivum something.

Butterflies, some monarch cousin whose name I do no know, seem to favor the echinacea  (coneflower) this time of year.

Now some years I grow more exotica and some years less.  The porcupine tomato below was a seed last summer.  I managed to overwinter it – solanums give me fits in the winter – a few of it’s siblings too.  They did not fruit last last year but they will this year.  Knowing this I put them in the earth this year.  The purple star theme makes me happy for some reason.

Two stalwarts of my plant world just keep growing.  This first is a cactus – nopalito where I got a piece to eat from the supermarket but it was going bad so I chopped out the seeds, threw them in some pot, and a dozen years later still it thrives – that’s the will to live.  The other I was walking one day in February in Santa Barbara in early 2004.  I found a palm tree bearing fruit in a park, gathered some of that fruit, planted it.  Still it grows.

And lastly, from the Darwin files, I have a planter or two where I throw stray seeds from supermarket fruits and anything else I come across – see who wants to grow.  This year, behind that innocuous purple carrot lurks the soul of a giant, a baby jack fruit tree.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackfruit.  I was in an Indian grocery store where I observed them to be selling fresh slices of jackfruit.  I was not able to get much of a positive impression from the fruit but knowing that it’s the largest tree-borne fruit on earth, supposedly, up to eighty pounds made me want to see if it would sprout.  I suspect it will be vigorous and hardy unless it’s sap is too sweet and it attracts scale.  We’ll have to see.  For the moment though just watching things grow that you’ve never seen grow before, that’s a delight.