August showers bring monster flowers

So the daisies have finally returned. With a vengeance.

For Tracy and me, one of the enduring pursuits of the summer has been to successfully nurture a healthy bunch of daisies. Tracy is daisy-crazy. Our wedding was full of daisies — and also the color purple (though that was more my fixation). But we've never really tried to grow the little dandies.

It started this spring, when Tracy got a tiny, little pot with some daisy seeds from the dollar section at Target. Some little green sprouts started to pop up, but they quickly died during a weekend that we were away from the apartment. It was pretty sad.

Then we decided we should get some real, pre-grown daisies, among other flowers, for our deck. We bought some nice ones from Linder's Garden Center on Memorial Day weekend. They're called Soprano White daisies, which is kind of a misnomer since they're purple (hooray!) in the middle and underneath (also, they neither sing with high-pitch voices nor perform an entertaining mix of Mafia and family activities).

But within a couple weeks, the flowers on the daisy plant disappeared. Over the many weeks that followed, if I wasn't working to resurrect my laptop, I was helping Tracy to vigilantly water and tend to our friends on the deck. While the marigolds thrived and the petunias bloomed up like bonkers, the otherwise healthy daisy plant produced no flowers.

For Tracy's birthday about a month ago, I offered to buy her a new daisy plant in lieu of a bouquet. We went back to Linder's but found no similar daisy plants left in the greenhouses. We ended up talking to a couple of Linder's gardening experts, who instead directed us to a $5 jar of PROThrive BloomEnhancer, which, as I just realized, is manufactured in Milwaukee. No wonder it worked.

And it did work. Within a couple weeks, we saw a single daisy finally bloom. A week ago, just before leaving for our big summer vacation in Kansas City, we celebrated a healthy bunch of blooms as Tracy administered the latest round of the fertilizer.

When we returned on Monday night, the daisies, apparently thanks to the recent rain, were getting out of hand. They had apparently overpopulated their own flower pot and had begun to grow horizontally in an apparent invasion attempt on the neighboring pot of petunias (also plentiful and purple). To avert a war, I deflected the invading daisies upward with a blockade of plastic knives in the soil.

As the rain has continued, the number of daisies and the size of the plant have continued to increase exponentially. Tracy, shown with the daisies this evening, had to prop the plant up against our lawn chairs to keep it from growing out into the parking lot downstairs. It is really something to see — the photo hardly does it justice. And here for half the summer we thought we wouldn't see another daisy. You've got to thank God for the little things like this.

I can only imagine how well the daisies would be growing in ... Purple Rain.

Please forgive me for the cheese-ball ending. I really, really had no intention of building up to that awful punchline. It just happened. You have to believe me.