Plants growing in strange places.

[PrinceAlarming]

Today, while beating the crap out of a carpet with a broom in the back yard, I discovered a tiny crop of chives growing from beneath a crack in the granite foundation.

I also just discovered I write ridiculously long sentences.

To continue, I have often been struck by the sight of plant life pushing its way through centuries of human development. Does anyone have similar stories? Maybe tales of woe while trying to rid the yard of some funky kudzu?

Prose on the persistance of plants?

[Frelga]

There used to be a little tree sapling poking out of a gutter in an office building across from a parking lot. They cleaned the gutters last fall so it's not there anymore. Too bad, it was a bright and tenacious thing.

[vison]

Blackberries.


If humans left the area I live in? Within two years the whole place would be covered with enormous thickets of blackberries.

[Primula Baggins]

Much of Washington and Oregon already is. Himalayan blackberries. We've got 'em behind the rhododendrons; going back there and trying, again, to kill them is a twice-yearly ritual for Mr. Prim.

[PrinceAlarming]

It's fun when fruit or herbs grow randomly. There used to be this odd little apple tree in a park I walked by every afternoon on the way from school. Little apples; tart and juicy.

[vison]

Oh, the best apples in the world were the apples growing on the tree by the road at my Mum and Dad's place years ago. We called them "road apples" and when we found out that horse dung was also called road apples we laughed a lot, but we still loved the apples.

It turns out the tree was probably a Nova Scotia Gravenstein and it is now part of a very swanky golf course that got built on our old farm. I drove by there last fall and swiped a couple of apples, but the last time I drove by they had built a fence.

[Primula Baggins]

I've got strawberries all through one of my perennial beds. I didn't plant them, ever. But I eat them—my reward for weeding.

[Rowanberry]

If there's the tiniest crack in the asphalt on a walkway, there sure is a dandelion pushing out of it.

[truehobbit]

(I think I mentioned that in some other thread here before.)There used to be a German children's TV format with a green outlook, called "Dandelion", that had an animation of a Dandelion pushing through a crack in the asphalt.

Gives a person reason to hope, it does.


Oh, and we had an opium poppy (gah, what a dreadful name - I looked it up, but isn't there another one in English?) blooming in the gravel on our driveway five or six years ago - I took some seeds, and had some on my balcony a few years following, but it's completely gone now.

Still, I thought that was way cool. (Although I never had the guts to try out how real it was. )

It's amazing what plants pop up where you never put them - mostly they are good surprises, though sometimes they'll force you to weed, even if it breaks your heart.

[Primula Baggins]

I like this image, which I used for a sig when I was beginning to recover from chemotherapy. It spoke to me somehow.

[vison]

Snowdrops are the most exquisite little things, aren't they?

Right outside my window is a big Crimson King maple. It is blooming right now, delicate yellow blossoms and red leaves unfurling. Kewl.

Years ago my Mum gave me a clump of orange poppies, not California poppies. They are everywhere around my yard, and while they are technically weeds I leave them, since the cheerful orange is so, well, cheerful. A few clumps are yellow.

Then, last year, masses of red poppies in my garden, where a bunch had gone to seed years before. Gurdip who used to work for us swore they were Opium poppies and he took some of the gum off the seed pods, but whether they were or not, they were sure pretty. And lo, there they are again.

Pouring rain right now. Sorta tired of the rain.

The wild Bleeding Hearts are blooming, though.

[Frelga]

We had a tomato poke up in our backyard out of nowhere. The only thing I can guess is that we had a lunch outside and some seed found a pleasant spot to sprout??? Good tomatoes, they were, too.

[PrinceAlarming]

At my father's house we would always have a crop of wildly growing pumpkins push their way through the a pile of compost. That's where the pumpkin guts would go after carving them for Halloween. Then we would carve those pumpkins and the cycle began again.

YAY!

Behind a building where I used to work highschool kids would frequently smoke cannibus after school. The seeds would get thrown into the soft fertile earth, and come summer scraggly pot plants would somehow fully mature.

I've been told that the 'bud' was never that good. Something about mixing male and female plants creates some seedy weed.

[Inanna]

Ferns. Any place which gets high rainfall - these things grow like NOBODY's business. So entire East India (Assam etc) is full of these things. My school would spend time and money clearing up areas behind classrooms (with a bulldozer, mind you) just to have ferns sprouting up again in NO time at all.

[Trazúviel]

Kudzu...that is one crazy plant! Thankfully we didn't have it in our yard when we lived in Georgia, but it was almost everywhere else. It did make a pretty scene down by the creek on a summer morning, before the sun came over the hill, and the mist was thick on the ground. Very ethereal.

When we lived in Louisiana, a clump of some type of iris popped up from under the front porch. They grew pretty tall and had lovely purple flowers. Then hubby dear mowed them down thinking they were weeds.
Somehow he survived.

The same yard also produced wild onions, wild strawberries and pepperment plants in various plots. Talk about a confused aroma after mowing!

So far here in Texas it's been rather dry. The only things that pop up are weeds in the grass, and grass in the beds.