On a recent excursion to a garden centre, I was taken with the marvellous flowers and foliage I found there–a fuchsia-coloured Hebe (I wonder if it flowers like my plain ones? What a welcome parade that would be!) and a captivating deep warm pink petunia, golden-throated with burgundy veins.  I’ve seen and grown a lot of petunias over the years, loving them for their bright colours, resiliency and heady fragrance but I’d never seen any like these.  I knew I “had” to have one.  It’s still going strong several weeks later with little tending. But I’ve just discovered, as I ventured out into the rainy garden to visit it, slugs and/or snails like it too though I couldn’t find any at the scene.

While there can be difficulties with hybrids—especially when they are proprietary like these (some are naturally hybridised while others are developed and freely shared); this Hebe and petunia each have tags with stern warnings against propagation without a license, I can’t help but enjoy them.  I’m a visual artist and I don’t like anyone copying my art without permission either.

God made the glorious plant world but gave authority to humans to make something of them. How lovely it can be when people work together with God to make things beautiful.

Also pictured are a wonderfully fragrant stock (known as Virginia Stock in the U.S.) in vibrant orchid—an old-fashioned flower that’s seeing renewed popularity, and an old faithful Creeping Jenny that readily self-propagates by roots and will come back year after year.  It’s yellow green colour is part of my garden colour palette to coordinate with deep pinks and purples.