Flowers

"Um... I think the girls are out cutting the blooms off your flowers..." my auntie informed with some amusement yesterday afternoon.

"They're deadheading," I said, hoping they were. Sure enough, EHJ was outside carefully explaining to Bei Bei where to trim. A pile of exhausted blooms lay on the picnic table.

 

Just before the blog went into lock down, we planted flowers around our patio. It was Mother's Day weekend, and I was anxious to get something green in the ground. We decided on snapdragons, marigolds and a variety of mum. Working on a citrus palate with glimpses of pinks EHJ dutifully helped me select flowers (that ranged from .8 yuan to 1 yuan or 12 to 15 cents per plant.) She delighted the dark skinned countryside vendors by carefully selecting the nicest plants and putting the stragglers and fragile ones to the side. They made a sport of offering her a poor plant and giggled thru glinting gold capped teeth as she politely pointed to another instead. They were delighted by her asking the price and telling them, in precise Mandarin, how many of each plant we required. 

The snapdragons have already been deadheaded and re-bloomed several times since then. The marigolds... those sturdy and pompous flowers have flourished. The variety of mum is now dead, so we will soon be darting back to the countryside vendors to find some more annuals for the planters.