The Hideous Mutant Plant

Nature is wild... in many senses. In this case, I am using the word "wild" instead of.... "far-out"... and although that would be appropriate, too, it would be with a lot of trepidation and skepticism.

Last Monday I was treated to a day at The Getty Villa in Malibu... it was a beautiful day and on the new path leading to the main garden is an Echium - Pride Of Madeira - healthy, happy and beautiful. Here it is:


(Click on the picture to see a larger version...)

Now - a couple of years ago, mine looked like that, too... but then there was that killer frost several months ago (in January) and the entire plant was very severely frost burnt. In fact, it looked pretty dead to me. Then - it seemed to recover. So I started trimming off the dead stuff. And that was when I noticed that it didn't look quite right. A couple of weeks went by before I decided that something was definitely wrong. What had survived the frost was looking like some weird kind of cactus…


The more I looked at it, the more it disturbed me. I loathe cactus anyway - even succulents can be a tough sell to this misplaced English country cottage gardener - so the bizarre change in this specimen's DNA structure due to the frost, which is the only thing I can think of to explain the revolting mutation, made me conclude that this was no longer a Pride of Madeira, or a pride of anything for that matter. It had to go and the sooner the better. I was starting to have nightmares.

One last look:


Ah! Like an unwelcome houseguest… it's gone! All that remains are a few dead branches - and those will be gone by nightfall. I'm tempted to drench the soil with some sort of disinfectant - like bleach - but that might be overkill. I'll let that area lay fallow and see what happens.

Isn't Nature wild?