Last week I was reminded of how nature can hand us a treasure if we‘re willing to observe carefully and be patient.
While I was in upstate NY, away from my apartment in Manhattan, weeds had joined forces with my ivy and jade plant to give green life to my terrace. I’d been back two weeks when a friend looked out through the terraces’s grimy windows and said, “There are weeds growing in your flowerpots! Why haven’t you pulled them out!”
“I’m not sure I will,” I told her, “I’m enjoying them.”
The next morning I stepped out and looked at the weeds more carefully. There were three varieties. A tall one, awkwardly reaching toward the small amount of sunshine available, another with several bushy heads, doing just fine, and a third that seemed to be clinging for life on an ivy runner.
A few days later my friend stopped by again. We both stepped out onto the terrace.
“When are you ever going to pull those weeds!” she questioned.
“I don’t think I will. Look at them carefully. Each one is unique.”
“Well you certainly could pull that puny one that’s wrapping itself around your ivy.”
To make my argument stronger (who knew one of these might be an endangered species), I decided to identify them. Searching through agronomy websites I determine that one is a white fleabane.
I couldn’t find the other two. I took a photo and emailed it to my agronomist brother John. Then he in Indiana, me in Manhattan looked at the photo together. One is a mare’s tail. He says it’s the bane of farmers throughout the country.
“I’ve never seen the other. Not native to the central or northern midwestern states,” he tells me.
So one remained unidentified. It wasn’t adding much to the grouping, and I was tempted to pull it out, but looking closely at the little plant, I saw an emergent bud.
I can’t pull it now, I thought. I have to see what the flower looks like when it opens.
I checked on my plants again in the early evening. There was now a small flower on the plant whose life hung in the balance, but it was drab, almost colorless.
In the early afternoon the next day, as I was about to sit down for lunch, a speck of white catches my eye. To my surprise, the flower had evolved into a delicate sphere of hundreds of white filaments.
The plant continues to bloom, going from bud to flower to a perfect ball of white fluff in twenty-four hours. Similar to the way a teenager, overnight it seems, turns from a gangly kid to graceful young woman, my weed goes overnight from nondescript blossom to a perfect ball of white fluff.