Growing With Science Blog

Yesterday was a lovely day for a walk through a botanical garden. It’s enough to make one wax poetic.

Flowers dressing up with a bee for jewelry.

The warm brown seed beetle looks rather like the seed it was born inside.

Another kind of green malachite attracts your eye.

Captivating captive beauties.

Feels like we need some words of wisdom today. How about:

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

This very strange seed pod was given to us by someone who knew we liked plants. (Yes, this is from a plant!)

Have you ever seen one before? Do you know what the plant is?

Edit;  The answer is now posted.

The pretty seeds from last week’s mystery…

grow into into pretty flowers.

African daisies, Dimorphotheca aurantiaca, are annuals that were originally from South Africa. but are now grown throughout the Southwest.

The flowers vary in color from orange to yellow to almost white.  They are very easy to grow, and once you plant them, they readily reseed and spread.

And that’s the problem. If African daisies escape from urban landscapes, they can grow wild, crowding out native plants and interfering with natural habitats.

We are slowly converting our patch into native species like desert marigolds, poppies and penstemons by pulling the flowers before they set seed. It is a tedious process, but we are making progress.

By the way, there are also a couple of other species of flowers that go by the common name African daisy.

For more information about this species, see the Arizona Master Gardener website.

Have you ever seen an African daisy?