I bought a bouquet for Valentine’s Day and didn’t even see the lilies tucked into the arrangement because none of the buds were in bloom. One of the long pods fell off when I was putting the stems in a larger vase, so I tucked it into a small glass vase. The whole floral display is nice, but watching a single flower open and bloom may be my favorite. However, once it is in full bloom, the scent is overwhelming and needs to be replaced with a new bud. Ah well.

My Thansgiving cactus bloomed! Which is amazing because I didn’t intentionally do anything. The grow light it is under did stop working for an undetermined amount of time (if we have a power outage of even a microsecond the timer resets and I don’t typically notice for awhile). I have read that to get a christmas cactus to bloom you need to give it less light, less heat, and less water. So maybe this reduced light did the trick. I haven’t changed my watering schedule (if a plant can’t handle my watering schedule, it is not a plant for me, because I won’t remember a different schedule), and we keep the temperature of the house fairly constant during the winter (there is a different summer and winter temp, but within the season, it doesn’t vary much). Any who, it is a nice splash of bright color!

We planted some mist flower bushes (obtained from a local hardware store, so genus is suspect) in our front flower bed. Mist flowers are supposed to be a butterfly favorite. I’ve found skippers on the branches, and Sophie the cat likes to lounge under the foliage, but I’ve seldom seen a butterfly on ours. It went to seed last fall and the pods are quite pretty up close. The previous year the cold killed it off to ground level, but this year we didn’t get that kind of cold, so it could seed out, and now there are buds forming all along the branches. Yup, Texas, spring comes early here. I’ve even seen flocks of red-breasted robins in the neighborhood. I didn’t know they flocked.

These paperwhites are from the same planting as the flowers that bloomed in November. The whole patch was planted two or three years ago. I rather like their sporadic appearance!

I’m not sure if I’ve never seen dandelions blooming in December, or if I’m just looking for more 2020 weirdness. This is a common dandelion; it turns out there are other varieties as well, but for me, this is what I mean when I say dandelion. And no, I don’t pull them.