Link Spotlight and That Purple Thing

Wanted to share two things which are actually one thing just two ways.

I subscribe to a fun newsletter called "Now I Know," and this morning's article was on an intriguing plant called the Burning Bush. This perennial herb can be set afire! Well. Sorta. Check out the link, here.

I've spent way too much time on this website; The Helpful Gardener really is just that. It's got to be one of the most concise and streamlined source of gardening how-to's, when-to's, and why-to's.

While I was browsing the site, I found a list of plants known to attract butterflies. So I start clicking through, and I stumble across the Aster. Check out the pic below!

See that? For a few long moments I thought someone had walked up into my yard and taken a picture of The Purple Thing growing in a flower box on my front porch!

Let me tell you the story. Two years ago, in 2011, mom and I picked out some daisies at the store to plant in our flower box.

2011

See the green clump at the far right? We thought those were just another sort of daisy. They were inch and a half wide bright purple flowers. Cute, right? So we planted them. The colorful daisies never made new flowers and eventually died, and that clump in front never bloomed beyond the few flowers it came with. We thought 2011's flower box was a bust. Bah!

We were lazy and didnt clean it out. And when spring of 2012 rolled around, the Purple Thing was still alive. And in late January... February... March... it was blooming! When everything else was dead, that Purple Thing was covered in flowers.

2012

This picture above is from May, 2012. And you don't see any flowers on it. That's cause it stops blooming when it gets hot! And That Purple Thing doesn't like us to take care of it either. If we water it, it tries to die. If we fertilize it, it sulks. Know how we found that out? We planted those little annuals behind it; the more we tended them, the more the Purple Thing hated us. So we stopped bothering with it, the little annuals died, and the purple thing hunched there all summer long.

So now it's spring, 2013. Look. Just look:

2013

2013

You see all that? This is March; that Purple Thing has been blooming for well over a month. And it's covered in more buds just waiting to open. The greenery is almost touching the ground in the left picture. The bees and butterflies love this thing! We don't water it, we don't feed it. Mom has decided she wants to cut it back this year since there's a lot of dead material in the center of it, so in the summer when it stops blooming, we'll do that.

So today's lucky find is that I may be growing (not growing? letting grow?) an Aster in my flower box. We're not going to plant anything with it this year, since it likes to be left alone. The main trunk of this plant is easily three inches wide. The only curious thing is that the growing instructions on the Aster's page don't match what we've been doing, hahaha. But why teach an old flower new tricks? It brightens dim, cloudy winter days with incredibly vivid purple flowers that tend to close up around 4pm and open again for the morning.

If anybody has any other thoughts on what this could be, I'd love to hear!