Not Chinese Lantern

Besides the occasional corn or bean plant grown for a science class, this winter was the first time I grew plants from seed. I followed the winter-sowing advice on Gardenweb, but I planted my containers a little late, in February. Nevertheless, everything but the delphinium sprouted. Although I used a top-grade potting soil, I also had quite a few weeds sprout. In some containers, it was hard to tell which seedlings were weeds and which were my desired flowers.

My Chinese lantern container was a wild success. It was full of green growing things. I picked out the oddballs as weeds and nurtured the remaining plants. In the spring, I transplanted them into a pot sunken in my sun bed. (Chinese lantern, Physalis, can be very invasive.) Only two plants survived the move. They were ugly cusses, but I held on to the vision of gay orange laterns brightening my Halloween porch. When the blooms appeared, I became a little suspicious of the plants' identity, so I looked up photos of Physalis blooms online. It turns out that I've been coddling a couple of weeds.

Quite serendipitously, my neighbor invited me over last night to identify a plant with "balloon flowers" in her yard. I recognized it as Chinese lantern. True to its invasive nature, it was a pest in her yard. I told her of my failure to grow this very plant from seed and she immediately yanked one up and gave it to me. If it lives, I'll have some fall color on my porch after all.