Portulacas

Here's pictures of some portulacas planted on the edges of the beds in our front and back yards.

I first planted portulacas in a small patch of land next to a little studio apartment I lived in in LA about 10 years ago. The apartment was above a garage and next to it there was this little weedy patch about 10 x 20. I asked my landlady if I could dig up the weeds and plant a little garden and since it was sort of out of the way and people rarely object to anyone voluntarily pulling weeds, she consented. I ended up planning tomatoes, some red and yellow peppers and then a bunch of flowers -- mostly seasonal stuff with lots of zinnias, petunias and impatiens. In the dead of the summer I planted portulacas, which I'd never known before, but are really nicely flowering things once they get going. They're annuals, which are both fun and sad, since you get the satisfaction of seeing them bloom quickly, but then you have to seem them die off quickly as well. They are heliotropic (the flowers turn to face the sun as it moves during the day) as well as diurnal (the flowers open in the morning and close at night). I felt obliged to shoehorn those words in somewhere just because I spent a lot of time learning what they meant and you can't really throw them into a normal conversation. Anyway, I showed my kids some morning glories in our neighborhood recently told them that the flowers open and closed. They were a bit skeptical but we did a check before and after sunset and I was justified in the eyes of my 4 and 6 year olds. Abby came up to me the other day and said that portulacas were related to morning glories since they closed up at night. I thought it was pretty observant and I was pleased to see that my botanical indoctrination was beginning to bear fruit. It's always nice to close on a bad pun