My garden has always been a clean messy jungle. I’m not a neat freak, I don’t pay attention to keeping every leaf and flower in order or have a designated area for every plant. I remove the weeds, but when it comes to flowers I just let them grow where they want. If this means that my carrot bed needs to be a cosmos jungle, or my orchard turns into a mint field I’m perfectly fine with this. The same story is with the front yard. I just let the flowers grow where they want. I think it would be wrong to keep a perfect order while living surrounded by forest. Nature doesn’t plant the plants in perfect rows so I don’t do it either, except for one place: “the brajda”

This is the only place where everything is tidy, tied well, and cut to the same level. This is my dad’s playground and I don’t get involved too much. I plant the flowers around it and cut the overgrown branches during the summer, but other than that is not my responsibility. So I was really surprised when the grapevine started flowering with blue flowers.

It wasn’t difficult to realize that this was an Ipomea vine that somehow got lost between the grapevines and is now blooming. It looks really weird, especially since the neighbors all have grapevines in the yard and none of theirs is blooming.

Still, we decided to leave it, it will not do any damage and it will freeze during winter. The Ipomea seeds were probably dropped by birds from one side of the yard to the other and it grew in the perfect place to have its own climber.

While taking photos of Ipomea I noticed another weird vine between the grapes. Leaves are similar to the grapevine, but more creased, with small thorns all over the leaves and vine. This is the main reason why I didn’t remove it from the brajda. I didn’t have any gloves on and I wasn’t in the mood to have my hands full of thorns so I just left it. I googled and soon found that I have common hop growing in the brajda.

I vaguely remember that a few years ago I got a couple of hop seeds, but I can’t remember what I did with them. They aren’t in my seed collection anymore, and since I don’t throw away seeds I’ve probably just sown them in the yard and forget about them. So now I have hope growing in the yard. 

Can’t say I’m too happy about it, I’ll probably remove it in the autumn, or try to move it to some other place. 

With the mild winters, we’ve been having I’ve been discovering the long-lost plants all over the garden. Who knows what will be the next plant I’ll find.