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12 September 2006
Humor, a la Mother Nature. This freaky silly thing is growing by our sidewalk out back. It makes us laugh.
That's an awesome plant, chewie. I have absolutely no idea what it is. Do you? I bet weretable would know.
A couple years ago, I had a weird fungus in the driveway. It's called Pisolithus tinctorius, or the dyemaker's puffball, but its common name is "dog turd fungus." Guess why:
Some people from the university identified it and wanted to collect it, but I told them no -- I really wanted to see what it was going to do over the course of its life.
Then the next-door neighbor kid, in a fit of generosity, put my trash cans out one night when I was away. He ran over the thing. I was so sad.
My sidewalk find isn't quite as gorgeous. It's a rose mallow of some sort, with lovely violet flowers. I found it two summers ago coming out of a crack in a concrete slab on our rental property, and tried and tried to propagate it in a safer location. I moved one sibling, I tried cuttings, I tried planting the seed balls.
Last year I was spraying weeds and managed to get too close and it died.
This year, though, two fresh plants grew a short distance away. One was actually in grass and liable to be mowed, so I felt I was losing nothing by putting it in a pot, and surprisingly this time it worked. It doesn't flower the first year, they say, but it looks reasonably healthy, after a couple of dicey weeks when it seemed to fall over limp every time it got a little sun.
The one that's still in the sidewalk, which isn't the orginal, has a very rough swamp-mallow appearance and the flowers aren't quite as lovely as that first one. It really is a plant only a wildflower lover could love.
(ppst, chewie - that's a weed. A pretty weed, but still totally a weed. Of course, I've never been one to advocate the senseless destruction of pretty things.)