a delightful surprise

Our side yard is a wide expanse of weeds, grass, and wildflowers. One midday walk in my garden, I happened to see a lonely plant in a sea of weeds and grass, sporting brightly-hued flowers.

My first instinct was to dismiss it as a wildflower, but something about the beauty of the blooms drew me close. When I got near, what do you know! It’s one of those lantana colors I’ve been wanting to have.

To tell you frankly, there’s a dense jungle of trees and bushes near Cousin A’s place and at the edge, wild lantana bushes are thriving robustly. I’ve been meaning to, er, steal some cuttings but I was too shy to creep up to it and snip me some, heh.

Once I saw these beauties, I immediately saved me some branches for my island garden. :)

new plant in the garden

There's a new plant hanging around in my back porch--the de facto plant incubation (or acclimatization) place for things that are going into the garden.

kalanchoe blossfeldiana, a new baby
in the itsy bitsy farm back porch, heh.

A few days ago, we held a memorial for my father-in-law's death anniversary and my enterprising sister-in-law N bought a flowering potted plant instead of cut flowers.

Nice thinking, N! ;)

A search in Google revealed that these little babies are kalanchoe blossfeldiana, which normally blossom in spring but can flower the rest of the year.

My new babies are beautiful, aren't they?

flowers in my garden

Bright, colorful, swoon-worthy beauties, courtesy of my garden—both vegetable and otherwise.

golden lantana

tomato

peas

bush beans

eggplant

asparagus yardlong

zucchini

blue daze early in the morning

another blue daze at noon

mexican petunia

indian hawthorne flower

I love flowers now, but that wasn’t the case before.

You see, I grew up in a very bucolic setting—in the midst of a sleepy farming village in the heart of Northern Philippines.

The lifestyle is very simple: fathers go out to the ricefields at 5:00 in the morning, mothers stay at home to tend to the children (or teach in the local public schools), grandparents spoil the kids with the occasional dirty ice cream treat, and kids climb trees and frolic in clear streams after school and during the weekend.

There’s not much trimmings in our daily lives, too.  That meant no dinners out in fancy restaurants for the whole family. The only good restaurants were the ones for travelers, and the menu is equally no-frills rice and viands.

So no fancy expensive cut flowers on Valentine’s Day either...save perhaps the calabaza blooms that fathers usually bring home for a tasty vegetable soup called dinengdeng.

Growing up with that hefty dose of practicality at home and in the community, I didn’t think much of the beauty of flowers. The ones that I liked were meant for eating, not gazing at. The few times I saw boys give flowers to the girls they liked, I marveled at the waste of money that went with the gesture.

But I feel different now. I’ve begun to appreciate the biblical connotation to flowers—that God takes better care of us humans than the flowers in the field which, despite their stunning beauty, are gone in a flash.

And that is why, I don’t berate my husband anymore when he buys me beautiful long-stemmed golden roses for special days, heh.