Lucky find

Mother Nature can be a darned odd lady to hang around with.  Earlier in the year, I shared some photos with Facebook friends of some horticultural oddities that had me scratching my head. Things like a spaghetti squash vine that popped up in my tomato patch, or a geranium sprouting out of a pot that contained an Elm cutting.  I can only suspect that it was a seed from the compost, or from recycled potting mix, or both.  I have no real sports loyalty,so the buckeye I planted was more of a horticultural curiosity, but it is frustrating that it has put on so little growth-there is squirrel planted nut of some sort three feet from it that has topped it in a single season

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I have Irish moss (Sagina subulata) growing in almost every bonsai or bonsai in training I have. Keeping it under control is a never ending battle. Every spring I take the culls that grew like crazy in the bonsai stock and tuck them between the bricks of the backyard patio. That's when plants that seemed immortal wither and die with in the week, often much sooner.

Some times Mother Nature is on my side, but she's quiet about it.
This common Fig (Ficus carica) is one of several that live in the back yard most of the year, then bunk in the garage the rest of the time.  Last year's winter was pretty brutal, with temps in the garage getting close to zero. Two of the figs managed to leaf out in the spring, this one did not. Thinking it was a lost cause, the pot sat in a corner of the yard behind a fence waiting for a good time to recycle the pot.  Three months later, looking for something else, here was a fig tree, looking very much alive.

Recognize this plant? Take a look at the tubers growing underground. It's ginger, right from the grocery store. Well not right from the store, the knob of fresh ginger probably sat in a kitchen cabinet for several months, until it was a shrived up old bit of leather. It wasn't really planted as much as thrown away under some newly spread mulch. Five months later its a good looking plant, and looks like plenty of ginger to cook with.

The ginger is sprouting not far from a St John's Wort bush. I noticed a few seedlings popping up under the bush, thinking they may be root suckers.  On closer inspection, it was clear that though the little plants looked quite a bit like the St John's Wort, there were differences.  What they look like to me are pomegranate  seedlings. Where could those come from? Again the compost pile is the likely source. Last Christmas time, one of the items from a holiday fruit basket was big red pomegranate. As good as it looked, procrastination is easy with this fruit-they are labor intensive! Long story short, the pomegranate ended up in the compost bin. How the seeds themselves got out of the bin in into the mulch is a question. There were five seedlings working their way out of the mulch, the one that was getting the most sun was the tallest and thickest, no surprise there.   I cut back the top growth a good deal, but left the roots pretty much alone, just washing the heavy clay soil off and getting the little plants set up in proper bonsai soil.

The pomegranate leaves are shiny compared to the St. John's Wort they had been growing under.
Their roots had made a twisting path through the mulch, then once they hit the clay soil underneath kept going. I kept some of the top growth that I trimmed to see if they would root as cuttings.

Here are the seedlings potted up. The curves came from growing through some fairly large sized mulch nuggets.  Word to the wise: always handle collected plants carefully.  The nice thick specimen on the left had the start of a nice tripod root base already in place.  One misplaced tug and that tripod become a bipod.


Pomegranate are popular bonsai subjects. The dwarf for is most often used since the leaves are much smaller the the species,   Easy to grow and adaptable, they can be found in many nurseries, not just specialist bonsai suppliers

. They strike from cutting fairly well,m and obliviously are not hard to start from seed

Here's an example to aspire to: fullsize Punic grantaum styled by John Naka, now part of the collection at the National Bonsai & Penching museum.