Many years ago I dug out a plant in a narrow bed against a wall leading up to my entryway.  I was certain that the plant was a weed! It never occurred to me to ask anyone about it.  I didn’t even think to check with the previous owner of my home.

 

Oftentimes over the years, small plant shoots would appear and I simply pulled the “weeds” out. What I did NOT know was that the root system was quite strong. It began moving underground to the large hibiscus plant next to my garage.

 

Ultimately the plant started winding its way up and through the hibiscus plant, occasionally showing buds that opened.

 

Last week, there were so many full grown purple flowers around the outer edges of the plant, that I asked the gardeners to trim them off. They had been in the way as I walked past them.

 

After they were cut, I felt bad when I saw the abundance of live flowers on the ground. I was too embarrassed even to photograph them that way. 

 

I took several into my home and put them in a vase. As the flowers died, I noticed some of the stems had minuscule buds. I left the stems in water and the buds did open into very tiny flowers that lasted for a day.

 

The point of this story is, that during the times of all  the cutting, discarding, etc. over many years, I had been wrong. And, as I wrote above, I had NEVER checked out my assumptions.

 

With the buds emerging, I became really curious. I searched Google Images for “purple weed” and this flower did not appear in any of them. As I continued searching I was led to the “PictureThis” App. I downloaded it from the App store and did a search on it using the photo I had taken. 

Imagine my surprise to learn it was not a weed. Rather, it was a Mexican Petunia!