'Retro' Fever Can Add Whimsy to a Garden

Buttercups, officially known as Ranunculus [Latin, “little frog”], are bright yellow stand-outs with their rounded and shiny, almost waxy petals. When I was growing up, they were fun, graceful staples in my grandmother’s garden. Here on Main Road, they appear as “opportunistic weeds” [wikipedia]  to remind me it’s time to cut the lawn. 

It is one of life’s little ironies that weeds often show up when we need them least and most. I planted a hardy purple groundcover ajuga in one of my flower beds, only to have it declare “Westward, ho!” and head along the cracks in the driveway toward the neighbors.  It was replaced  back in the bed itself by a ‘weed’ popularly nick-named Creeping Charlie that has taken over its role of adding color to the spot.  And Charlie seems perfectly content to stay put, just fine. 

A favorite "opportunistic" lawn resident is a pert little daisy-like critter---definitely a wildflower---known as fleabane.  It's petals are dead-giveaways for fleabane's membership in the family of common asters (also technically a wildflower) that have taken up residence in front of and on the west side of the house.  They bloom in conditions that other plants avoid like the plague and survive well into the fall after everything else has quit.

Which only goes to show, one person’s weed is another’s flower.  Then, too, our taste in gardens and gardening can evolve over time.  It is a revelation to me to see gardeners deliberately cultivating some of these tough, no-nonsense historic perennials again.  It's a little like young adults getting into 1900s solid oak furniture after decades of laminates, chrome and plastic.   

At a recent book-signing, a young woman threw out by way of aside as I signed a copy of one my novels, "Wow, I like your earrings." They were my Mom's---hot pink celluloid roses.  Clip-ons, no less. Retro rules. . .in and out of the garden. To quote my boomer generation, "Cool."