The garden is a fabulous place to putter around in. You never know what you're going to come across. Sometimes things appear that one could hardly comprehend where they came from. Perhaps a passing bird deposited an exotic seed from someone else's garden through evacuation. Who knows? Sometimes you'll come across that rare occurrence; blue-eyed grass in bloom and look at it in wonder and admiration, those lovely miniature flowering grasses.

Oops! pardon our bare behinds, but we're Faith, Hope and Charity

Gardens have their own inimitable way of surprising, gratifying and mystifying the avid gardener. We're thankful when we see that those plants hovering on the brink of our growing zone managing to make it through the winter. Our original magnolia tree was not meant for this zone, yet by blanketing it carefully winter after winter we have come to the point where it has adjusted and no longer needs winter protection; just as well, given its now-enormous size.

There are pretty little garden thugs that puzzle us, like those that need no encouragement to multiply and grow in places we'd rather they not, like the ground-cover ajuga, like Johny-jump-ups, those sweet little violets that meander, infiltrating lawns, and like their cousins, the woodland violets, enthusiastically blooming throughout the garden, despite desperate bouts of excavating them. Even Lady's Mantle, despite its genteel name, has a habit of sending its underground rootlets similar to yellow loose-strife, proliferating everywhere.

Last year I noticed that a bindweed had grown alongside one of our climbing roses and was accommodating itself to complementing the rose. I left it in place; you never know, though I should have. In Georgia we would occasionally see bindweed with lovely small bright pink trumpet-shaped flowers in the unlikeliest of places. Here in our own ravine, we've come across ground morning glory and I've viewed it rapturously as one of those wonders of nature. I've transplanted springtime-blooming trilliums, foamflower and Jack-in-the-pulpits from the forested ravine to our gardens and they've thrived there.

So I'd left the bindweed and it grew to maturity and never did produce any significant flowers that I could see. Yet, it must have. I spent quite a bit of time this morning in the most inconvenient places yanking out bindweed seedlings that have cropped up everywhere in that particular garden, drat it.