Nursery hopes, then reality

Went to the nursery for a single perennial, now that I have a bit of room to plant one, where the contractors killed a lot of ground cover.  And had a lovely time in the sunshine with the dusky swallowtail butterflies, and the resident calico cat playing in a box.

Everything seemed to be annuals, though.  So after admiring a lot of things like this

 and this

I settled on this

and a trip to the library having yielded a Donna Leon I hadn't read, this seemed fine anyway.   Rosemary, tarragon and nasturtiums. 

A lot of art emerges after trips like this, where you don't have an art related goal, but let images just flow in.

Speaking of which, I made a bonehead mistake the other day with that little purple flower.  I had a brain freeze on sansevieria because of looking up snake plant which is sansevieria.  Of course the little purple flower isn't.  It's tradescantia virginiana, aka spiderwort.  Great apologies to the Tradescants, father and son, plantsmen several centuries ago with exciting lives finding and identifying botanical specimens in some very hazardous places. 

I do realize that this correction is like that joke in Christie's A Murder is Announced, where the learned parson says to the tiny congregation of tired old ladies: I expect you thought this was about Artaxerxes the First!  Well, you're wrong!  it's about  Artaxerxes the Second!  I probably got this a bit wrong, too, but you do see.  Only an obsessive could notice and bother about this sort of thing, but that's me.  And to prove it, go here for more info about John Tradescant and his exciting life.  These guys got around.