I Have Nice Weeds

Common mullein (Verbascum) is a weed that pops up wherever it wants to. It needs little water and likes sandy, rocky places to live. This past summer a colony of mullein appeared that I did not plant and that has never been in my yard before.

There is an odd spot to the side of the house along a fence where a creekbed of white rocks runs from the street and ends abruptly at a patch of pink volcanic rock. 

I don't garden there; it's out of sight from the house and kind of around the corner. It's a dead end alley where the utility meters are.

And there, at the very point of transition between rocks and pink gravel, almost a dozen mulleins came up. What amazed me was how they were so artfully scattered at just the right spot, each tucked into the rocks as if deliberately placed to make a dramatic architectural boundary. 

Verbascums are biennial, so the first year they are just foliage, the second year they send up flower stalks. Some of these self seeded plants were just leaves, but some had tall stalks. So the colony must have been there at least a year before, but I truly never saw any until this year.

The flowering plants get tall and bold. Buds open up to produce small showy flowers, usually yellow, all along the length of the stalk, and some cultivated Verbascum varieties are beautiful and colorful. But these wild ones were not. 

They started to open yellow at the top but then browned and the whole thing looked muddy. Still, even without showy blooms, these were architectural, strong plants that perfectly defined the area and I couldn't have designed anything better.

Another self seeded weed grows right out of the patio wall stones. It's hairy goldenaster (Heterotheca villosa) and like the verbascums, it just showed up. It's hard to see, but the stems are actually rooted between the stacked wall stones.

It never gets watered, and it blooms with sunny yellow daisy flowers. When the yellow flowers came out I put some pots of annuals around it and called it a wildflower meadow.

There are actually several self seeded hairy goldenasters around the yard, and the one by the driveway gets big, if a bit rangy.

It too is artfully placed just at the corner of the juniper and driveway. Like it was placed there.

A tall pink flowered penstemon showed up out in the sand of the common area next to our driveway. It is Palmer's penstemon, and over a couple years I've seen more appear in unrelated spots far from each other.

The pale pink flowers are frilly and the stalks are strongly upright and the isolated clumps of them break up the barrenness of the sandy open area. It is supposed to be the only scented penstemon, with a lovely fragrance, but I have not noticed any smell.

It amazes me how these weeds -- wildflowers, if you prefer -- live in such harsh conditions and seed themselves and even flower with absolutely no water and no care whatsoever from me. They are additions to my garden that I could not have planted in better spots.

I have some nice weeds, don't I?