Pansy commando raid

Pansies are growing in our lawn. Purple ones. I planted them last June on the back slope to “add instant color,” as annuals are always promised to do. Both the purples and the yellows survived the winter, blooming smaller and smaller flowers until nothing was left but foliage and I lost track of them. When I started working back there in late winter, I saw that three or four clumps of pansies were starting to grow and to show future blossoms. Now they’re blooming.

I thought these were the same clumps I originally planted. Now it seems they have reseeded themselves and launched an invasion, jumping five feet straight out into the lawn. They appeared there two days after the lawn was last mowed, as if they had parachuted in, and they have very little leaf or stem—just enough to support their little purple faces. Any day now, the lawn guys will come and mow again, and then I bet the pansies will pop back up. I love this climate.

We’re starting to get a lot of sunny warm days in a row. It feels so good to be outside. Yesterday (following up on my complaint about bad volunteering experiences) I went to the arboretum at 9:00 AM to help three experienced volunteers take plant cuttings and put them in pumice-gravel flats to take root. I was there until noon and had a great time. It was sunny and beautiful out, so there could have been few places as good to be as in the arboretum, under the trees. The three women volunteers I worked with were very easy to be with. Two were about my age, one of them an oceanographer. The third was an older lady who may be retired, or close to it. She was very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about all the plants, jumping from one topic to another. I’m looking forward to talking more with all of them next Tuesday. It doesn’t look like I’ll have my next temp job by then. Luckily I have a freelance copywriting project right now (a white paper about a software company’s technology) so I’ll earn a little money and appreciate the free time even more than I already did.

Now I’m off to Lowe’s to get a lot of bags of mulch. I thought I had enough, but no! You can never have enough mulch—especially when the weather starts drying out for the long haul, as it is now. Any day we’ll start seeing more brown in the lawn. Only flowers get the privilege of water.