It’s a dreary, drizzly day, so I thought I’d base today’s post on a lovely flower photo from last summer!

Ten years ago, when we moved into our house, there were drifts of bulbs–glads, daffodils, snow drops, grape hyacinths, etc.—planted all around the house. One of our first jobs was to re-pile the south side of the house, which was largely held up by a few broken bricks and toilet seats (I kid you not). We hated to just trample all those bulbs, and we wanted to get vegetation away from that side of the house anyway, to help dry it out a bit. So we dug up all those bulbs—hundreds of them. I tucked many of them into the end of the vegetable garden, for lack of any other place to put them. My intention was always to remove them once we’d managed some landscaping in other places.

I did end up moving most of them, but I’ve grown rather fond of the glads that pop up around the garden gate every year. That end of the garden isn’t very productive because there is too much tree competition, so I’ve left the flowers. Vegetables are every bit as ornamental as “ornamental” plants, but it’s nice to have a bit of useless beauty amidst all those hard-working vegetables (and the hard-working gardener).