Pacific Northwest Gardening: Favorite Surprises in the Garden, 1 by kosk0025

kosk0025 wrote:
Okay---here's a new topic. Do you have any favorite surprises in the garden? Something that showed up, even though you didn't plant it? Perhaps it was carried by a bird from someone else's garden and deposited in yours? Something of yours that self sowed when you didn't expect it to? Something that came back a second year even though it wasn't supposed to? A "weed" to others, but something you've kept and cultivated because you love it? Pumpkins that grew from the compost pile?

This has been my latest fascination. I pause before pulling anything I think is a weed. Here are a couple of things I'm glad I didn't pull that have been pleasant surprises for me. The first picture is a hollyhock. I came so close to pulling this last year when it started growing....but I had a sense it wasn't a normal weed in my yard. (Having never grown hollyhocks before, the foliage didn't stand out to me as being that, so I didn't know what it was until it started to grow vertically this year.) I'm glad I left it, and I wonder where it came from. As far as I know, there aren't wild weed growing hollyhocks (perhaps there are and I don't know it?), so it probably came from one of my neighbor's yards... Anyway, I love it, and I'm glad I didn't pull it. It's just starting to bloom.