A few days ago I was taking the long way home from doing some errands. I had Nate in the car with me and he was having a good snooze in his car seat, and I didn’t want it to end early. I just kept on driving. In my travels I came across a little plant sale not too far from our home. I made a mental note to check it out later on, maybe on a walk with the baby.
Later that evening Graham and I decided to take a walk to the store for an ice cream after dinner, and after we picked up our treat, we continued on to the home and plant sale I had noticed earlier.
There were campanula, lilies, perennial geraniums, hostas, ferns…the lady of the house had divided all kinds of her perennials and set them up for sale in her front yard. Most were $2, but some of the larger pots were going for $5.
We got talking about the plants as I asked her some details about a few that she had. “Oh, you know your flowers!” she said to me when I asked her what colour bloom her pulmonaria (lungwort) would sport. “How do you know so much about plants?”
I told her I had been gardening for several years, and just learned as I went, and that I was always on the lookout for unique plants for our garden.
“This is something special,” she said, and pointed to a pot containing a plant with tongue-shaped leaves, deeply veined in burgundy. “I don’t know what it’s called, though,” she went on. She had lost the plant’s tag years ago and hadn’t been able to identify it since.
“That’s bloody dock,” I told her. I had just acquired it myself last weekend at the You Grow Girl plant swap. She was absolutely delighted to learn the plant’s name, and said she’d be going inside to look it up on the internet.
I bought a pretty deep red hens-and-chicks and a perennial geranium with a red pattern on the leaf before we continued on with our walk, and introduced myself to her. She’s been gardening and composting for forty years. She offered to show me her garden sometime.
It’s always such a pleasure to meet a fellow gardener, especially in my own neighbourhood.
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That is so neat that she was selling her plants in her front yard!
.-= meemsnyc´s last blog ..This is what the hosta used to look like =-.