I know it looks like the wild, but if you look carefully at the upper right you can see a corner of the veggie garden and the edge of the trough this grew in.
For ten years or so this astonishing Castilleja scabrida graced this trough, invariably coming into full bloom at exactly the time of the Rock Garden Club spring plant sale: year after year we had to lug the damn trough down to the Gardens for the sale, and always some one would sidle over and offer to buy it. Who would sell the only trough in the world brimming with this tiny, brilliant and actually quite abundant Castilleja from the slick rock of the Colorado plateau and especially the San Rafael swell. The mystery is that no one has bothered to go out there and gather lots and seed and replicate our feat.
Except David Joyner--the long time president of the Wasatch Chapter of NARGS--who grows dozens of species of Castilleja like weeds: don't you just hate people like that?
You don't have to be annoyed with me, however, since this little gem is long gone. Although the delight it brought me for most of April and May year after year still lingers: thank heavens we have cameras and pictures to prove things. As Geoffrey Charlesworth observed, it really doesn't matter if you've grown a plant so much as it does that you have photographed it to PROVE you've grown it!
