Thursday, June 5, 2008

Two Blocks of Orange

While walking to the local farmer's market I spotted this great garment and thought: "this is something for my orange post!" (Earlier I had assumed I'd put an actual orange someplace in town and photograph it.) Now I didn't need to.

Almost right next door to orange garment was orange snow shovel, which was even more interesting on an 80 degree day.

Once I got to the farmer's market I figured what the heck, take a picture of this.


And then I spotted something I'd never seen before - 'johnny jump ups' with an orange petal! I thought they were lovely and two other people joined me in praising them to the farmer who was minding the stand. It would have been so easy for him to sell a bunch of them to each of us, because we were all seriously considering it. But then he did something that amazed all three of us. He criticized them, called them ugly basically, but he took a few paragraphs to explain why he thought they were so unappealing and then said he much preferred the "normal" ones. We 'possible customers' looked at each other with a WTH? look, and wandered off as the farmer stood holding up his 'normal' flowers and admiring them. Oh well. I kind of wanted some of the 'abnormal' ones, but didn't want to say " I'll take a pot of the ugly flowers." Sheesh.

Johnny jump ups are also known as pansies, violas, and wild pansy.