Stop! Thief!
On my way home yesterday I stopped at the local garden shop and purchased two stakes for my lovely Canterbury Bells. My primroses are just about history (no tolerance for those days in the mid-eighties that we’ve had off and on for the past few weeks) and so I need to think about what to plant to replace them. My original plans have quite gone out the window. The web sites I’ve found on Campenula say they’ll be blooming for months, so I need to find something that complements them instead of planting the kind of splashy colors I had last year. I eyed up the available plants, got a few ideas without being completely happy with any of them, and headed home with my stakes in hand.
Little did I realize at the time I should have been buying garlic and silver bullets as well.
To explain what awaited me upon my return, I offer up to you the pictures I’ve taken during the previous nine days of anticipation:
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Take some time and extend a little pity for The Socialist. To his eyes, someone picked a flower. To my eyes, someone murdered my first-born. That was the very bud that I watched like a hawk, took several dozen pictures of, and brought me hope that I wasn’t just cultivating some carnivorous weed. Somebody killed Audrey II. And The Man-Who-Would-Go-Ballistic-If-Somebody-Scratched-His-Fancy-Wheels doesn’t quite get why I’m not only enraged, but in mourning.
The truly damnable thing is about this is that I have a better than fair idea of who did this, and can’t prove a thing. My apartment building is cursed by the presence of The Demon Seed and her sister Spawn of Satan. It is almost guaranteed that The Demon Seed is responsible for this outrage. If it isn’t her, then Spawn of Satan did it. A surveillance camera stationed in my upstairs window caught the two of them in action yesterday evening, along with their friend The Accomplice, probably hours after the Evil Deed was done.
The Demon Seed has been bouncing and kicking a soccer ball around our parking lot for the past few weeks. The Socialist, who loves his car as he loves life itself, has been keeping an eagle eye on her, ready to pounce if that ball so much as moves the air adjacent to where his Matrix is parked. That, so far, has not happened, but his watchfulness did allow him to be an eyewitness when Demon Seed kicked the ball at the brick wall of our building, only to miss and hit a downstairs window instead: Soccer ball-1; Window-0. The Socialist duly reported this to building management the day after it happened, but since the child continues to bounce the ball around the lot, the only thing that’s been fixed is the window itself.
This is the self-same child that I caught staring at me through my sliding back doors last year, when I was laid-up after my surgery. Gods know what she was thinking, but it was just plain spooky. Yes, I know that all this is slim evidence to hang my hat on regarding my mortally injured flower, but I don’t have to be Fair when it regards something less than twelve years of age. The only other possible agents of destruction are Skater Boy and his brother next door, and those two are far more likely to snuff their cigarettes in the flower than to pick it.
I imagine that poor AudreyII is languishing somewhere now in a makeshift vase on somebody’s kitchen counter or, worse, lying forgotten and wilted in some ditch alongside the drives that cross our complex. I have every right to be furious, and if another flower is gone when I return home tonight I cannot be held responsible for my actions.
And they wonder why I never wanted children.
In the category of “coming attractions”, it is now apparent that there are multiple kinds of Campenula mixed together in each bunch. This bud has also appeared in the middle of AudryII’s sisters’ buds:
I suspect this may be the cup-and-saucer variant that someone (Yarngirl?) mentioned in a comment yesterday. With luck, it won’t be picked before it opens and I’ll get to see it.
Also, one of the purple flowers on the smaller Campenula opened yesterday, and somehow escaped being plucked (possibly because its stem had fallen and it was face-down in the dirt). I staked it up, and the flower seemed none the worse for wear. There look to be perhaps a dozen more purple buds in various stages of development.
Cattitude was permitted a brief stroll last night, while The Socialist washed the wheels on his car and I took pictures of my garden and other monsters. I snapped this picture of her hiding behind the Canterbury Bells as dusk descended:
