Surprise!

Have you ever received plants in the mail (or via some other delivery service)? Maybe they were from an order you placed, or due to a trade you had arranged with distant gardening friends? It's great, isn't it?

Know what's even better? Receiving a plant in the mail when you were not expecting one. That's right, surprise plants!

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Actually it was just a single plant, but you get the idea -- it's exciting!

For the past year or so I have been bugging some of the warmer-climate gardeners I know who grow desert mallow to collect some seeds for me. I first saw this plant in the desert around Las Vegas five or six years ago, and I fell in love! Those orange blossoms -- just fantastic! Doing some research I found out that it was probably Sphaeralcea ambigua or "desert mallow", a plant that is probably not cold-hardy enough for my garden, although sources conflict on that. I grow plenty of plants that are not cold-hardy, so this didn't deter me -- I wanted to try this plant!

I received some seeds from Cat at The Whimsical Gardener last year but they never germinated -- Cat wasn't sure that they were fully mature, and I guess they weren't.

This winter I asked Cat to keep an eye out again for any seeds, and emailed Jenny at Rock Rose (who has such a lovely Texas garden), asking her to collect some mallow seeds when she could -- no hurry.

Yesterday I got an email from Jenny saying "Mallow should arrive by Friday. Hope it survived." Literally 10 minutes later my wife walked in with the mail, holding a package.

Jenny had sent me a desert mallow plant!

Dropping everything to open the box, I found a little bit of soil spillage but an otherwise fine-looking plant.

Jenny's note said that it had been 90ºF (32ºC) the day she packed this. A bit of a shock for the plant to arrive when it was 32ºF (0ºC), but no harm done. Tough plant, right?

I love the fuzzy leaves!

A nice, woody stem, and because of the soil spill I was able to see a nice root system too.

There were seeds in the box too, collected by Jenny from a wild plant in Arizona (if I can read the soggy, soiled note correctly). I got those started right away, as I'm always nervous having only a single specimen of a plant I really like.

I wonder if I'll get to see any blooms this year, or if I'll need to wait until next year? (It's a bit early to start thinking about overwintering strategies for next year, so I'll worry about that later.)

Thank you Jenny!

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