I thought it seemed appropriate that I would use an image of my globe thistle for this post. Two years ago I started this plant from seed. Last year, as most perennials do, didn’t flower but gave out lots of lovely green, spiky, and slightly-ominous looking foliage.

This year, it grew to a height of five feet, and sent out five heads that would take an eye out if I didn’t watch where I was going poking around in the garden. The flowers unopened look more like a medieval torture device than a flower, but after a few weeks of those scary looking heads imposing over the garden, each spike produces a delicate little pale lavender flower. They’re beautiful plants, a mixture of thorn-like buds that would put even the most gnarly rose bush to shame, and soft small blooms that the bees and butterflies damned near fight over to get to.

I watched this plant very closely as it grew, knowing that it’d take two years to get to the point where I would see the fruits of my labour (so to speak). Caring, fertilizing, weeding, and taking general care of this flower just to see it produce five flower heads. I thought about taking it with me when I leave my place (as I’m doing with several other plants) but the thing about globe thistle is that it doesn’t like to be moved, there’s a good chance of killing it no matter how careful you are. Globe thistle likes to be left alone.

So, I’d rather leave it to the next occupant of this house so they can (hopefully) enjoy it as much as I did. And hey, as it turns out I’ll have lots of garden room and new adventures ahead, and I’m sure more globe thistle will be started in a few months.

I’d rather know it’s living happily, than risk bringing it with me. I hope its new caretaker will appreciate it as much as I did.

Who doesn’t love daisies? Almost anything with a daisy-like flower I will fall head over heels for, but the classic white shasta daisy will always have a home in my garden, wherever that garden may be (and in a few months it’ll be located somewhere in Victoria, BC).

Unlike most pretty flowers people have in their gardens, shasta daisies stink to high heaven. Have you ever taken a really good sniff of a flower? Cat pee. That’s what they smell like to me. Maybe that’s the reason that the plot I planted these in never have neighbourhood cats come and dig in it (but that’s just my theory).

Shasta daisies are a favourite plant in almost any garden because they’re extremely hardy, are very attractive to bees, hoverflies, and other pollinators, and are about as easy-care as you can get. Drop them in the ground and walk away, and they’ll continue to double in size every year. Hell, I don’t even fertilize mine.

The classic shasta makes me smile every time I see it. No matter what my mood, it could be a no good, very bad day, but when I see those big white flowers, I smile. The stink is well worth it.

I am not a rose person.

There are two large, old, climbing roses that grow up against my house that I am constantly cursing and threatening to rip up (even though I never would – I respect a plant that is at least 50 years old). I have absolutely no interest in taking care of roses, or of even cutting them and bringing them in my home.

But wild roses are a different story.

I love wild roses because they seem untameable, with there legions of thorns bidding you away. I also love them because they’re simple; devoid of the big showy blooms that most most people have growing in their yards. If I had it my way I’d rip up those two climbing roses I have, and instead plant some wild roses.

Wild roses hold a special place in my heart. They’re my home-province’s official flower, and as one may expect, they grow everywhere there. In the house I grew up at we had a big old wild rose with a swath of lily of the valley that grew underneath it, right up against an old white fence. Wild roses make me think of home, and of family, and of old memories.

When I was a teenager I couldn’t wait to get out of Alberta, and move to the seemingly-so-exciting west coast of BC. I don’t regret the move, BC is nice (and a lot less colder, which is my main problem with Alberta), but what I do miss are the sights and sounds of Alberta. Big open sky, huge fields of mustard and wheat and canola. Bison and muskegs and pigeon hawks. The way Alberta seems to radiate yellow and orange and gold. The night sky that is so big, it can feel oppressive to somebody who didn’t grow up there. Northern lights of pink and green and white.

It’s funny how sometimes you don’t recognize beauty until after you’ve been away from it for so long.