Oh Willow Weep for Me! A Gardening Trail of Tears.

A Stand of Lilies

This is what you call a stand of lilies. Oh, I suppose if you had acres to occupy you might do a lusher job, but here we're talking about a bitty border on a city street - so it's quite a sight. And there's no support or ties or whatnots. The stalks are proudly upright and massed with yellow trumpets.

Then there's THIS:

A Droop of Lily

THIS sorry display was in my back garden yesterday. This morning it is sadder still, as Someone managed to knock its support and step on the single flower -- which I've spent the last month waiting for. May I say, this lily whatever it's called has been taking up precious space for several years, growing taller and leggier every season -- but has never been more floriferous.

Massing of Mallow

Continuing on our early morning walk to and from the market to resupply my Prince with his bananas and juice we come across another curbside display, this a massing of mallow -- dinner plate sized relatives of the tropical hibiscus -- this example, growing in part shade, smothered in buds.

Pathetic

And to think of all the self-congratulatory yelping that went on as I left the house with a fond gaze into the trough of ivy, basking in its patch of part sun, and the f-ing spindle of fertilized and coddled mallow that has managed to poke its way up and put forth three buds (one a year I think that is). This will probably bloom while we're on vacation, as these things do.

Angel's Trumpet

Ah yes, there's more. Here we have something that really makes me puke, a largely untended curbside clump of angel's trumpet. Look, LOOK at the buds on this sucker!

Uh

And here we have -- why is the bare and anorexic stalk of my angel trumpet reaching for the heavens? And I was enjoying (another) self-congratulatory moment with it just before my hike -- thinking about the duPont Garden in Wilmington where angel's trumpet are trained in pots as standard trees and fantasizing that this is where this sorry (and entirely flowerless) specimen that I've been nursing for three summers is headed. Even my cunning under planting of moon flowers and pink morning glories is struggling. The god's laugh.

Pink Trumpet Vine

Yes, it looks like a bunch of dead sticks (though the cilantro seed I tossed in to remind me not to discard the pot IS flourishing. Ole', guacamole).  However! No one else in the neighborhood has one, so what you have here is area's premier example of a pink trumpet vine.  Exquisite, isn't it.