in praise of volunteers

Human volunteers are unpaid helpers that add untold value to an organization.  Plant volunteers are just as valuable.  They weren't planted on purpose - they appeared from seeds spread by the wind or stuck to clothing or tools.  They keep their secrets, and are a delightful surprise.
These rudbeckia sprouted in the strawberry patch as if by magic.

A local nursery is selling them right now, but I don't know how they managed to make it to my garden.

Borage has become too much of a good thing, reseeding all over the vegetable garden, blocking the walking paths as they fall over.  The blue flowers are lovely, and the bees are all over them.  Today a horde of ants attacked me for pulling some out.  The flowers are edible, and the leaves are said to taste like cucumber, but not to me.  Their spikey stems force me to wear gloves to pull them out.

Creeping jenny:  this is sold as an annual.  A few years ago, I dumped my containers in the garden in the fall, and was delighted to find creeping jenny still alive the next spring.  I planted it in several places, where it took off.  It forms roots every few centemeters, chokes out other plants, and is impossible to remove completely.  Even pesticides don't work.  Now it is invading the lawn.

Sumac spreads by underground runners from the mother plant.  Luckily, it is easy to pull out or mow down the ones I don't want.

Here is a volunteer I actually like to see in my lawn.  Wild creeping thyme turns whole sections of the lawn purple in summer, and smells great when stepped on.
When I worked at Vesey's Seeds, customers from the Island would come in and complain about the purple stuff on their lawn.  I told them nothing less than a nuclear explosion would get rid of it.  And tourists would come in raving about the beautiful purple lawns, and want some to take home.  One person's weed is another person's treasure.

Golden rod is kinda pretty contrasted with purple monkshood.

This mallow appeared a few years ago.  It started small, but now it's about 5 feet tall and wide.

I planted poppy seeds in a garden far from where these two popped up.  This is an annual poppy with silky pink petals and gray-green leaves.  I cut off the seed heads to encourage more flowers.  But they still manage to reseed like crazy.

For a long time, I wondered why so many volunteer tomatoes popped up in the vegetable garden.  My husband Wayne is the culprit.  He hates tomato seeds and the gel around them, so he scrapes it all into the compost, where it sits over the winter.  After I spread it out over the vegetable patch in spring, the seeds spout.  The plants come late, but some do produce fruit.  I'm sure if I purposely planted tomato seeds directly in the garden, nothing would sprout.



Early this summer, we mowed around the clumps of ox-eye daisies that spring up all over the lawn and flower beds.  They didn't attract a lot of bees, but small flower flies came in abundance.  After the blooms faded, we mowed them down, surely spreading more seeds ready to pop up next year.