I Wish, I Wish

 

    We are in the Nursery & Landscape business so our job is to design, grow, install and maintain our customers’ yards.  A job we love.  A little stressful when we see plants struggling in this heat, a fungus developing in the middle of a green lawn or, gasp, weeds.  Weeds is a four letter word - with an s at the end.  When I waited tables in college and someone said they were ‘in the weeds’ that meant they were way behind and needed help.  Even outside the nursery industry, weeds are a bad thing!   We own 25 plus acres and try to keep our weeds to the naturalized area, away from the nursery.  That is the area where I sometimes see deer and turkey, so one evening I took my camera to look for something interesting to snap a picture of.  What I found were wildflowers or weeds to a manicured lawn. 

  

There was an abundance of delicate Queen Ann’s Lace, roadside asters, purple thistles and some strange reddish thing with green treadles which was really cool.  Some of the wild grasses with the arching habits and golden tones, rivaled some of the ornamental grasses I sell at the Garden Center.  There were wild daisies to petal-pluck to see if you were loved and buttercups to hold under someone’s chin to find out who loved butter. Heading back to the house I caught sight of a dandelion puff-ball.  In our household a dried dandelion becomes a wishing flower. 

My daughter would see a wishing flower, dash over to it, and carefully pick it, so as not to release its magic accidently.  Holding it firmly yet carefully she would close her eyes and say ‘I wish, I wish, I was a Princess’ then blow the magic into the air.  And it really worked!  Upon opening her eyes, she had become a Princess, and I dare anyone to argue with me.  So a weed is in the eye of the beholder…a rose is a weed in a cornfield and a dried dandelion becomes a wishing flower in the hands of a child.