Bantam, my ass
My littlest chicken next to my biggest. Don’t worry about her, she’s quick and agile and more than capable of avoiding surprise chicken sex from that hulking lummox.
It was a GLORIOUS day here today. Sunny, not a cloud, getting near 70F. I sat in the garden most of the day, soaking it up.
I discovered an Ipheion uniflorum growing wild. No, no…don’t worry. I’m still allergic to horticulture. I looked it up with Google Lens.
Maybe everybody knew this, but I’ve just discovered that Lens – an app most known for reading QR codes – will identify plants for you. Take a snapshot, tap the Lens button, and it makes its best guess. I used it to figure out who the survivors are in the herb garden.
Here’s the thing about our little flower friend, though. How the hell did it get there? It’s growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Wikipedia tells me the variety was brought to the UK in 1820 from somewhere near Buenos Aires and it’s grown from a bulb. We’ve been here 14 years and we didn’t plant it.
How in the Sam Hill did this bulb get under our pavement?
Posted: March 30th, 2021 under animals, birds.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from AliceH
Time: March 30, 2021, 11:15 pm
Missouri Botanical Garden says “Naturalizes rapidly by bulb offsets and self-seeding”, so you may have a self-seeded specimen. I thought it was a fairly common wildflower, but I guess people probably do buy them and plant them on purpose.
Comment from AliceH
Time: March 30, 2021, 11:30 pm
Oh, I didn’t know the name of them. We have wild flowers referred to as star flowers, but I haven’t paid attention enough and it seems to me more than 1 kind of flower is called that. I’m still trying to sort out jonquils vs daffodils, which first requires deciding whether to use botanical, commercial, or regional usage classification.
Comment from Mitch
Time: March 31, 2021, 12:40 am
Oh! You found my Buenos Aires bulb! I wondered where I put that thing. I’m gonna need that back BTW.
Comment from Uncle Al
Time: March 31, 2021, 1:09 am
“Springflower” is a quite lovely name, much nicer than the only two plants (trees, actually) that I remember seeing a lot of a long time ago when as a boy I lived in Buenos Aires for some years. There were lots of the familiar and beautiful purple Jacaranda trees, but in Spanish that initial “J” sounds like you’re about to spit. The other one was the weird and beautiful Palo Borracho, which translates to “Drunken Stick”.
Comment from durnedyankee
Time: March 31, 2021, 11:10 am
Borracho, yeah!
Uncle Al, that Borracho site obviously makes you drunk, I could hardly read a word of it.
But the pictures is pretty! Ah, traveling the world with you actual travelers is amazing sometimes.
Comment from Deborah HH
Time: March 31, 2021, 12:49 pm
The self-seeding idea seems likely to me. But I planted some flower blubs too deeply and they never bloomed. Then about 10 years later—some of them bloomed. I guess they were slowly dividing underground until they pushed up far enough to bloom. Maybe your flower bulb was buried deep down, and has been valiantly working to the surface ever since.
Comment from BJM
Time: April 1, 2021, 5:22 pm
Birds spread seeds too…doesn’t seem too much of a stretch that a migrating bird pooped a seed or two near Stoat Cottage.
We have those too…they are called Starflowers hereabouts and are a pale periwinkle with a tinge of pink on the margins of the petals. I dug some up in our woods and replanted in the flower garden but as with most Amaryllis they take several years to bloom.
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