Late last year where my landlady had removed the garden at the side of the house, I found a rather strange plant squeezing up through the hardcore that she had had put down. I wasn't sure what it was because the leaves and their formation were not any that I recognised although it did resemble a bearded iris so I carefully extracted it and planted it in the back garden to see what would develop.
The plant settled in and survived the winter then started to grow when the spring came with some warm sunshine. It still looked like an iris but the leaves weren't quite thick enough so still I waited to see what it was. Two weeks ago it started to send up what appeared to be a flower spike so I waited eagerly for the flowers to appear and by now I knew it wasn't a bearded iris but it was something that I had never come across before.
Then on Friday, the first little flower began to open. It was a delicate yellow and rather small but still totally unfamiliar to me so I stuck my head in the books to see what it was. I went all the way through one of my wild flower books first, thinking it may be a wild flower that I hadn't encountered before even though I have a fairly extensive knowledge of our native species, but it wasn't there.
Eventually I found out what it was in the second of my horticultural books. It is a sisyrinchium striata and I have never seen one of these either in the local garden centre or any garden around here so I have no idea how it got to where I found it. Now it's thriving so I shall continue to nurture it because it deserves to be allowed to grow.
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