Two Unexpected Appearances

There are few things cheerier than the color orange. In the garden, one of my favorite orange flowers is Butterfly Weed, which as its name suggests, is just as attractive to butterflies as it is to me. Here is a close up from early June:

Now, most of the blooms are gone, and the Butterfly Weed is creating seeds, housed in the pods you can see here:

The pods dry out and crack open, and the seeds disburse in search of new homes.  [Note: People who know about these things (ie, real gardeners) collect the pods and keep the seeds for the following year instead of letting them blow all over the neighborhood. Now that I have finally figured this out, I will attempt to do the same.]

Last year, the seeds I neglected to harvest went their merry ways. One of them floated across the yard and over the fence, where it softly descended into a small patch of mulched earth near our garage. And there, it settled in for the winter, popping up unexpectedly as a new plant this year. I just discovered it a few weeks ago — a very nice surprise indeed. So this evening, I went to take a photo of it, and what did I find? A second unexpected appearance–in this case, a baby rabbit.

Tags: Butterfly Weed, pods, rabbits, seeds