The Simplest Surprise

When it comes to gardening, I mostly don't.  I love the idea of spending time pruning, preening, and picking, but it's just not practicable.  For now, anyway.  In my relationship with Sam, he is most definitely the green thumb.  I do what I can - which is to say that I mow the grass.  But as far as beautifying, that's really all him.

When we moved into this house nearly five years ago, we had very little landscaping to do.  We added some perennials to the flowerbeds for low-maintenance color and let it ride.

Every so often, the plants get a little unruly and we trim them back or weed them out.  Sometimes, they get more than a little unruly, and we have to spend a full day or more hacking and tugging.  We did that on Tuesday night.

Maybe it's because we were out, knee-deep, in the gardens that I noticed this week's Simple Pleasure, or maybe it's because they just bloomed and I hadn't had the chance to notice prior, but among one of our most successful patches of perennials - our yellow coneflowers - there was a surprise.

A solitary purple coneflower.

Now I'm sure there's some sort of scientific reason for this anomaly.  We do have some purple coneflowers in our backyard that we transplanted from our previous home that, I suppose, could have migrated out front via some sort of critter.  

But for me, I like to think God put it there to make me smile.  And to make me wonder over the glory of God embodied all around us - including in something so simple as a single flower.

The earth is filled with the Lord's glory.  Habakkuk 2:14

Join me and so many others as we recognize and cherish our Simple Pleasures with Dayle at a A Collection of This and That.