Nov 5th, 2024

Author: donich_admin

The mystery plants

Back in August R was speaking at a conference in Sheffield. This particular conference always seems to give a little tube of seeds away with the freebies in the “goodie bag” (normally it is pens, bottle openers etc). Last year I grew the seeds and they turned out to be some quite successful chilis. This year, the tube had no indication of what the seeds were – so I enquired and was told “Herbs and decorative plants”. So I planted the seeds and have carefully tended them, watering them every day, buying a special pot for them and even feeding them with tomato fertilizer. Only two really flourished and here they are.

A small digression here. When I was a child my Auntie Isobel lived in Balloch just down the road from here. One time we went to see her and she was growing a plant in a pot. When we asked her what it was, she told us she had instructions on how to grow a lemon plant from a pip, and this is what she was doing. The lemon tree sprouted remarkably quickly and flourished under my Aunt’s tender care for several weeks. At this point my Gran mentioned that it didn’t look much the way she had expected a lemon seedling to look – it looked more like a nettle. Everyone laughed and poo pooed this. The next week when we came to to see Isobel, the plant was gone, and she had a plaster on her hand because the lemon tree had given her a nasty sting.

To return to the point. Several months on I was very curious to see what our mystery plants were. I installed a plant identification app on my phone and took a picture of both of them. The larger one is a foxglove, and the smaller one is a common bird’s foot trefoil. We have both of these in our garden in abundance and they are broadly what I would place in the category of “weeds”. So I am no better than my Auntie Isobel, although at least my foxglove hasn’t stung me.