green things

It all started innocently enough with a banana plant. A good houseplant, we thought, and put it on a sunny windowsill with some optimistic seedlings (a guava on the left, I believe, and a papaya on the right). They prospered, and soon had outgrown a mere windowsill.








So we planted them outside, above our garden, with castor beans and sweet potato vines and cannas for company. They seemed to like it.







They grew so big that we never could pot them up again (although we did manage to overwinter a few, "dormant"). Fortunately there are always enough "pups" -- banana babies -- to keep us in winter greenery.




Here is that same papaya, at the end of summer 2005 (no, it did not survive our zone 6 winter):