Bloody Great Asters
Well, we had a hard rain and knocked the giant willowleaf asters flat. I don’t know why anybody wants a six-foot-tall aster anyway, except that I apparently do. Show me a native plant that gets eight feet tall and I will hand you my wallet, grab the pot, and run giggling down the street.
It’s a bit of a problem, I grant you.
This one was grown up against the back of the garage, a big blank white wall that should have been a perfect canvas for the aster, except that the aster decided to hell with it. Very tall plant stakes, it turns out, can be torn out of the ground by a sufficiently determined aster.
The flowers are lovely. The bees like them.
Great tall wands, covered in nickel sized flowers. You could say “forms an attractive vase shape” if you were the sort of garden writer that delights in deceiving your fellow man while still somehow telling the exact truth.
And the rain forms such marvelous little glass beads all over the flowers. You’d have one of those epiphanies about the glory of nature if you weren’t trying to drag the stems off the fig tree and the giant salvia that was behaving quite well and standing up just like it should until a bloody great aster fell on it.
At times like this, I must remind myself that I live in a very beautiful place. Despite my-and the aster’s-best efforts.
(View over the back fence. Looking away from the aster.)
Originally published at Squash's Garden. You can comment here or there.