Accidental Gardening

 The other grandmother in our family once used the phrase "accidental gardening" and I liked it, as it applies to so much of what goes on here at my north Georgia place.

The photo shows my, not so great looking compost, which needs some expert help.  I once heard a gardener on radio WSB say that having a compost is so easy, you just pitch any fruit/vegetable scraps and grass or greenery onto an out of the way place and it will compost itself.
So that is what I did for a long time and just left it there, mostly I just did not want to put peelings, etc. into the land field.

Then my son-in-law suggested he make a new one in a different spot and fence it in, etc.  That was a good plan so that is what I am now using.  Proof that I have neglected it hit me square in the face this week when my son-in-law pointed out to me that I had a jonquil blooming in my compost.  I had seen something  green but supposed it would be an onion which had been discarded there.  Not so.  It truly is a jonquil.  But how did it happen?

We speculated about that but came to no conclusions.  He  had seen jonquils coming up near his garden in the Atlanta area, in much the same surprising way.  My best guess is that when I trimmed the old dried flowers from my jonquils in front of my house, I must have thrown them into the compost.  There must have been some seeds already formed in at least one of them, thus the several jonquils coming up right where they had been thrown.

For me this is a first in traveling jonquils.  I have other plants which reseed themselves and present new flowers in odd places but never before jonquils.  In fact Jim's idea that the birds had planted the seeds may be the best  answer, as I saw another jonquil blooming far from the others down in the front near a big curve.  I had orange day lilies there but would never have put jonquils up next to the trunk of a  tree where these are growing.  So, let's blame it on the birds, or shall I say that accidental gardening has taken over where I had let down my guard.  Yes, I like that.  It does sound a lot better to me.