PLANT OF THE WEEK / MONTH / YEAR.  In my travels through the gardening web sites I have seen many of the above. Usually, a very fine picture and a short description of some nice looking plant is displayed. "Very nice", I say to myself, but is it fair ?

 Humans, and that includes gardeners for the sake of this argument, have feelings, emotions, loves and hates. It is part of the human condition, whatever THAT means. Have these  people ever thought about the feelings and emotions of plants ?.

Does a Cotoneaster care? Can a Hydrangea hate? Might a Leptospermum love? Who really knows ? My wife, the gardener, is a reasonably normal person, (In spite of being been married to me for a HUGE number of years), yet I often hear her talking to a shrub, whispering to a flower or see her stroking a tree. Gardeners, I have learned, behave like this all the time and no one says anything about it ( not out loud anyway) I once heard her talking to an Acer japonica for a full five minutes. I would swear it was talking back but it may have been a bird in a near-by tree. She treats some, if not all of the things in this garden as if they were real and maybe they are.  If they ARE real would you not agree that they would have emotions.

 Imagine, if you would, how you would feel if after working your butt off and being absolutely certain you were a superior candidate, you were bypassed, just because some other person happened to take a bad photograph of you.

 It is exactly the same, in the "Plant of the week/month/year" affair. You take a photograph of two plants, say, Buddleia davidii "Royal Red" which is magnificent and Cistus lusitanicus which is looking poorly. The picture of the Buddleia turns out badly so it is not used and the Cistus becomes the plant of the week/month/year. Just think how sad and sorrowful the poor Buddleia must feel. It has spent years doing the best it can, it KNOWS it is a better candidate than the upstart Cistus but because the person using the camera made a mess of the photography it does not make it. Unfairer than this you cannot get in the the world of horticulture.

For these reasons, a plant of the week/month/year will NOT be seen on this website.   I should add, in the interest of fairness to those sites who do show a plant of the W/M/Y that another reason that feature does not appear on this site is that it takes an amount of time  and dedication,  which things  I have in  small quantities. However I am thinking, very seriously of showing the "Plant of the Millennium".....some time before the year 3000, unfortunately I have missed the deadline for the last one.

IF, note the capitals letters, I was ever tempted to put a potwmy on this site it would possibly be the one below. This is because it once got the gardener out of very serious trouble when a garden club( an extremely posh one.) came on a visit early one spring. Some time I will tell you about that story. In the mean time you will just have to admire the Geranium maderense

A Seaside Garden  About the Garden  Garden Pictures