So the lantanas were nearly gone, and the African daisies contained. I had planted a couple of salvias, but they could hardly be seen because of the cosmos that kept growing (almost six feet now) and that were providing so much shade that the salvias had become uncertain of the role they were supposed to play. How can we grow and prosper when the cosmos are cutting off our access to the sun? We can’t flourish in the shade!
When I wrote “The Truth About Spring”, I mentioned how the morning glories were stretching up to and already curling around the lowest bar of the trellis. It turned out that only two seeds had taken root and grown. One stem did curl around the bottom bar of the trellis, and that was as far as its adventure went. It hung on doggedly, and even produced one blossom, but remained at eight inches—that high and no higher.
The other stem behaved, initially at least, as a morning glory should behave. Morning glories tend to climb whatever support has been provided, and this stem appeared to understand its business and be willing to fully participate. It snaked exuberantly up the trellis like it was running a race, pausing briefly to put forth one blossom part way up. When it reached the top, it busied itself by splitting into many smaller stems, each one adorned with a gaggle of the bright green heart-shaped leaves that are so attractive, and tendrils that were looking for further action. The morning glory draped itself along the top of the wall and flowed down like an emerald waterfall over both sides. The tendrils waved gently in the breeze. The morning glory looked healthy and at ease and pleased with itself.
But there was a problem. There were no flowers, just an abundance of leaves. The beautiful sky-blue flowers (the species’ name is Heavenly Blue) that I have admired ever since I was a small child when they bloomed all summer by my grandmother’s back door, were now in short supply and worse. Each of the two stems had produced a single flower—the laggard had bloomed at the lowest bar of the trellis, while the adventurer’s blossom had appeared around halfway up.
And now we’ve come to the anthropomorphizing part of this blog. What do parents sometimes do when they are unable to produce children themselves? They adopt one or more who were born to others. So, it was in the Moonshadow Garden. The morning glory apparently could not reproduce, so adoption was in order. Tendrils spread out and reached out—I’d like to say yearningly—but that’s over the top, even for me—and curled around the stems of blooming cosmos. They drew them close. The mauve flowers were certainly not morning glories, but they were grafted onto/absorbed into a morning glory plant/family. And they were not unhappy or rebellious with their altered status; indeed, they appeared to be quite contented as they continued to placidly move through the bloom cycle. Their cosmos roots were planted firmly in the ground, but their flowers waved happily among the green leaves of the morning glory who had adopted them.
