A Letter To Oxalis, A Misunderstood Beauty
It’s what happens when you look so pretty, spread so easily and demand so little
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Dearest Oxalis,
Today I met you for the first time, and only now, I wonder why I hadn’t noticed you before.
To be fair, to me, it’s been wet and wild here in the east coast of Australia, wet, wet and more wet.
But I’m not complaining.
I actually love it, maybe because I lived through a horrendous drought where I was convinced everything would die, and rain would never return…and that we might be no more.
Those were scary times when we wondered whether we could afford to wash every day, or use the dual-flush…something Americans once had no idea of (according to the Dixie Chicks!).
Well now, the rains have returned, seemingly never to leave. Bucket loads! And whilst our lawn grew to almost knee-high, and had to be cut twice (it’s winter for heaven’s sake!) the weeds have had a field day, actually lots of field days, truth be told.
There’s fierce competition in the garden right now, weeds standing tall in triumph, but the triumph is not easily won.
We have plants showing through that were never there before, lilies, daffodils, naked ladies, early-flowering gardenias, and others whose names I have no idea of. And it’s still winter.
But…
Nothing could have prepared me for the feast this morning. Totally unprepared I was for this vision of loveliness that I spied when I went deeper into the garden.
At first I thought…weeds…bright yellow weeds.
But then I decided you were much too pretty. So I took a photo of you and ran a Google search and there you were in all your glory.
Too easy.
This article says: Oxalis, genus of small herbaceous plants, in the family Oxalidaceae, comprising about 850 species, native primarily to southern Africa and tropical and South America. A few South American species have edible tubers or roots, but most members of the genus are familiar as garden ornamentals. The name is derived from the Greek word oxalis (“acid”) because the plants have an…
