Sylvus' Garden---Black Eyed Susan and Bachelor's Buttons

Black Eyed Susan and Annual Bachelor's Buttons

Or, Yes, some flowers really can be propagated from Seed

I may have even have grown these from seed. I've been trying to grow flowers from seed for years, usually with results ranging from mixed to dismal, and I've had the best luck with nasturtiums. (Those big seeds) I've certainly never saved any money (except perhaps with the zinnias) my obstensible reason for this exercise in futility. Can we say stubborn? All together, now...

I've had one clump of rudbeckia around for awhile, and in 1996 started spreading the volunteers and seed heads. As always the biggest problem was finding places with enough sun. (We didn't have air-conditioning for many many years, and even now don't have it in most of the house, so I do appreciate all the trees. But my next house will have sun.)

The black eyed susans don't suffer from those clumps of 1mm round grey dots (that I've never positively identified) which faithfully have appeared on the shasta daisies' leaves from the first year my mother-in-law gave 'em to me. (Naturally hers don't get that.) They did get a few slug holes.

Slugs were my pest for 1997. (I seem to get a new one each year. I think it was grubs in '96.) I put out beer, I handpicked hundreds of them, but they ate and ate and ate...hostas, pansies, violas, especially. You'll notice there aren't any pictures of those in this site, though I had lots, at least at the beginning of the year.

As for the bachelor's buttons in the background, they were very pretty, and they produced and produced those pretty flowers as long as I deadheaded them---but I don't really know where they came from....

Links to other garden photographs.