Monday Morning Musings #1: Challenging the adage "bad things happen in threes"

My Ajuga plant (seen in the photograph posted above) located in the northwest corner of my urban terrace garden has just given birth to triplets bearing a spectacular color somewhere in between purple and blue, a color that puts RGB charts to shame. From the looks of things, my Ajuga will be giving birth again soon, but I wanted to capture her first three arrivals of the season, and to challenge the statement that bad things happen in threes, both with the subjects of the photograph posted above, and with all the subsequent ones in today's blog entry.


Exhibit "A", my Basil Triplets (pictured below), which I had in my terrace garden in 2007; not only did they provide a nice scent to my outdoor haven, but they were an asset to my Blue Coat Gin and Q Tonic cocktails infused with Basil. Moreover, they looked great in a container created from an abandoned fireplace accessory, and, most importantly, they provided somewhat of a "hedge", giving me some privacy from my neighbors who live to the west of me, and who have put up white aluminum siding over their exterior brick wall; I guess they missed the suburbs.

In any event the "hedge"that this trio of basils provided, inspired last season's "hedge" created by a Passiflora (Passion Vine), seen in full force in the photograph below:

Exhibit "B", is actually my first "hedge", created when I first began gardening towards the end of the 1990's. It was a" hedge" that consisted of three wooden window boxes (sitting on top of bamboo shelving) that I filled with different annuals as the season dictated.

This "hedge" was built out of a necessity to provide privacy from a neighbor, whose bathroom window is just to the left of the gutter in the photograph posted above, and who insisted on exposing himself whenever I had guests in the garden. I was a "baby"gardener then, and, therefore, into the instant gratification annuals bring, instead of appreciating the joy in "watching grass grow', as I do now, which is a concept I discussed this past April which you can read by clicking here.


And speaking of grass, I give you Exhibit "C", in this case of mine designed to prove that things that happen in three are not necessarily bad, as seen here in the photographs below of my Ophipogon planiscapus (Black Mondo Grass) triplets,which looked lovely in my abandoned fireplace accessory (prior to moving out to give way to the Passiflora),

but, look even more spectacular in their other location on the opposite side of my terrace garden, where they are supported by a copper wire that's been tied lovingly around their containers to secure them to the railing that surrounds my terrace garden, and where they have been thriving under my Actinida kolomikta and Actimida (Kiwi Vines), as seen in the selection of photographs posted below, which are a close-up as well as a long shot of my Ophipogon planiscapus taken a few days ago and this past fall respectively.

Exhibit "D" in my case to dispel the-bad-things-happen-in-threes adage are these Echinacea Triplets posted below, that I grew a few years ago when I replaced my "window box hedge" of annuals with the fun-looking Echinacea triplets, that would become an inspiration for a petite wrap around greeting card that I created, which can be viewed in the store-front  pages within my my web-site, where they are available for purchasing when you want to send a greeting card that is about more than communication.

Exhibit "E" features the triplets known as Rosmarinus officinalis (Rosemary), seen below,

the herb of remembrance, as well as the herb which represents friendship (as you may recall from a previous blog post which may reread by clicking here), and the herb that looks great in color, and black and white (due to its unique texture) as seen below.

Exhibit "F" (below) features Japanese Painted Fern triplets, who resided in my terrace garden a few years ago.

And lastly, but not least, in my challenging the adage, Bad things happen is threes, I offer you Exhibit G, as in G for girls, and in this case, the girls being my sisters and me seen in the photograph below with our grandfather,

who clearly did not seem to believe that bad things happened in threes, and who, as you may recall is where I most likely received my inclination to garden (as I indicated in one of my first blog entries, which you may refer to by clicking here).

And with that, dear reader, I rest my case in my challenge of the adage bad things happen in threes.

Turning the Tables in Garden Decor

The ability to define my goals in salient points does not come easily to me. It never has. I tend to view most matters in layers and get caught up in possibilities. As a young junior high-school student, I agonized over the standardized PSAT when it came to multiple choice questions. The traditional choices for those test questions was usually something like this: Sometimes option "a" but never option "b" when "e" and "f" are present. On one occasion, when I questioned the teacher about various scenarios (which were delaying me from being able to go on to the next page), I was put out in the hallway, with masking tape bound over my mouth, and told "when you are ready to stop asking questions and make a quick choice you, can come back to the classroom."

This problem of taking too much time to weigh the answers in multiple-choice test questions occurred in test-taking again, when I was in high-school and took the SAT. There was a test question about how many clothes-pins it would take to hang laundry on a clothes-line. I found myself thinking, 'hmmmm, that depends . . . is the clothing heavy jeans and towels, or is it something light such as under garments?' I lost all my test taking time on those types of test questions, and since SAT scores are based on time as well as knowledge.

Fortunately, I passed the SATs with a score high enough to get into college, and I used my layered thinking to my advantage, graduating from the university with honors. My graduating from college, and my deliberating over option A and option B in relation to test questions, was a number of years ago, but the inclination to consider various scenarios of a given issue still prevails. 

For example, nearly ten years ago I found a wooden table (an image of it can be seen in the image at the top of this posting) at a local Flea Market. It seemed like quite a find at the time because it "matched" two chairs that I already owned. The table turned out to be a bit too high for the enjoyment of herb infused cocktails when sitting in those chairs, so I had to replace it which I did with a find from a used furniture shop, and it has been a mainstay in my urban garden for years to come which can be seen in photos that include the table in a previous post.

As for the fate of the wooden table, being a layered thinker, I turned it into a stand, specifically a "salad bar" where I attempted to grow salad greens such as tatsoi, dandelion, red lettuce, green lettuce, and green mustard (as seen below).

It had been my hope that my dinner guests could pick their own salad. I quickly learned that no mater how much loving care I gave my salad greens (and reds), they did not grow very well in terra-cotta containers. Therefore, over the following years the table supported a terra-cotta bowl filled with either Dragon's Blood Red Sedum plants, Amazon Sunset plants, Ajuga plants, and even Thymus Argenetus (Silver Thyme) plants. This can be seen in the corresponding photographs posted below.

Of course, this answer for the use of my table proved to be far from infinite. The table-top's wood became increasingly stressed by my watering the various plants, and by the table-top being subject to outdoor conditions of rain, hail, sleet and snow. The table-top's wood eventually warped, but I had every intention of replacing it — with lumber that I could order cut to size — so I could continue using the table as a plant stand.

Doing this became unnecessary when another layered thinker, Juan (who did the trivet installation for my Cheerful Cherry Farm Autumn Clematis to climb upon, which  I wrote about in a previous post), removed the wood, and placed my potted Fagus sylvaitca (Beech Tree) into the table's remaining rim. The result was extraordinary as seen in the images below.

Not only does my Beech Tree appear to love its new "home;" the passion vine, trailing on the rail behind it, is flourishing too. Moreover my 'Shigitatsu Sawa'- seen here with its golden-rose autumn leaves — enjoys (evidenced by its thriving) being alongside it. (An image of the 'Shigitatsu Sawas' leaves in front of the rim of the Beech Tree's pot was seen in a previous post.) BTW, Juan used the old wood from the table as a "footer" to balance one of  my heavy pots containing a shrub - truly turning the table's use in my garden.