A Whole New Way To Kill A Plant

You did what?!?!

How could you?  

A friend has been looking for Acacia glaucoptera for something like years.   Another friend commented it was for sale at a local big box store, so I drove there and bought the best two.  Friend had room for one.  I thought hard about where I could plant the second one.  Could not think of a place.  Could not decide.
Can't make up her mind, either.  Nap, or sleep?  

Do you ever feel utterly incapable of making decisions?  I read Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, wore the same type of jeans and the same type of turtle neck shirt every day, because it was one less decision he had to make.  His closet was a row of identical jeans and identical turtleneck shirts waiting for their day to be worn.  

I had complete decision burn-out, so drove back to the big-box to return the second plant.  

"What is wrong with it?" the lady at the return counter asked.  

"Absolutely nothing," I replied.  "I just don't have a place for it."

"Oh.  Too bad.  We have to throw it out."  

She wasn't trying to discourage me from returning something.  She was simply stating a fact, a rather sad fact.  Our area is a quarantine area for several pests, so you can't re-sell a returned plant.   I guess. 

I felt terrible, but could not face another agonized ordeal of find a place for a plant I don't have a place for.   

So, I condemned a perfectly fresh healthy Acacia glaucoptera to death.  A whole new way to kill a plant.  I thought I'd already done them all.  
"I'm not the one who should be wearing The Cone Of Shame!"

Ironically another plant that had come home from the same visit is a $1 plant from the "Death Rack", the rack of plants that had gotten ruined sitting waiting for someone to buy them.  

So, the store tries to sell some of them for a dollar each.  The rack that day held a lot of hopeless annuals and one limp Garvinea Gerbera full of dead foliage and minus flowers.  I pulled all the dead foliage, soaked it, and it is okay.  It even has a new emerging flower down at the base.  

But...I don't know where to plant the Gerbera, either.  

Dichondra sericea, another very recent purchase, went temporarily into a larger pot, the refuge of every gardener who buys plants without knowing where to plant them.  This is a more compact species than the also very silver Dichondra argentea.  D. sericea has larger leaves with attractive texture.  It is native to northwestern Mexico and one isolated location in Arizona.

 Ooooh!

 In other August news, Bombus sonorus, Sonoran Bumblebee, is currently mobbing certain plants in the garden:  Myrtus communis,  Tecoma stans, Salvia clevelandii.  There were at least twenty individuals on the Myrtus this morning.  

 Also a pair at Salvia 'Waverly'.

 These bees move really fast;  they are harder to photograph than honey bees. 

 At least I did something nice for Genus Bombus.