Iwas looking at one of my planters the other day and was surprised by flowers I had never seen before. These flowers were not to be found on any of my neighbors’ plants, so I was curious as to how they may have gotten into my garden. In all likelihood, their seeds were in the soil of a containerized plant I had acquired and planted nearby, or they had been deposited there in the excretion of a bird or rodent.

As I mentioned in last week’s column , I have a squirrel who has made itself at home in my garden, so maybe I benefited from its having foraged, swallowed, digested, and then deposited the seeds of the plants that produced these unusual flowers.

I thought the leaves looked like those on Calendula, but knowing that foliage does not necessarily correlate with plant identity and that

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