Late Bloomers

A couple of interesting late summer blooms at the Paco Command Center.

Mrs. Paco saw a bunch of these cannas growing in a planter outside Mr. Tire, the place in Fairfax where we get our car serviced (which, incidentally, I highly recommend, for both quality of work and honesty in business dealings). The manager kindly told her she could dig up as many as she wanted; Mrs. Paco modestly took only one, but she may go back for more. The purplish leaves and the orange flowers suggest Virginia Tech's colors.



Before we moved from Richmond to Fairfax, a neighbor gave Mrs. Paco a handful of seeds from a plant that I had never seen, but which my wife said produced a beautiful red flower. We planted the seeds, and a plant sure enough grew from them, but for the first two years, there were no blossoms. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if the thing was not perhaps a marijuana bush (the leaves looked ominously similar). This year, however, our long wait was rewarded, and the plant - which we have since discovered is called a Texas star - yielded several big, red blooms.