At the time I took this photo there was another plant flowering with the tag Cyclamen africanum. As this site indicates, they were indistinguishable from one another.
It’s difficult to tell from this photo, but this flower (and plant) is very tiny. Its pot can fit comfortably in your hand. Adorable.
Who knew there were so many interesting cyclamens out there? Who knew there were all of these tiny little types from Africa. My cyclamen knowledge has been completely limited to the few they sell in the impulse buy section of the grocery store. I know nothing. Nothing!
Visiting Barry’s garden is both humbling and exciting all at once. It makes me realize (yet again) that I can never and should never get too big headed when it comes to my so-called plant knowledge. There is just TOO MUCH. An inexhaustible lifetime’s worth of fascinating plants to discover.
This is optimistic though, don’t you think? I have met a lot of gardeners (sometimes myself included) both beginner and experienced who are perpetually wringing their hands around the feeling of not knowing enough. But really, if the knowledge available to acquire is limitless, we never have to worry about knowing enough or god forbid, knowing it all. You will never know it all! I will never know it all.
We can all just sit back now and enjoy what we do know, and what we will discover tomorrow.
Beautiful! It looks like some sort of propeller shaft on an engine. But mmuch prettier.
Gayla, you’ve alleviated some of my garden guilt, giving us all permission to not know everything.
Way back, I read someone (it might have been the “information anxiety” guy Richard Saul Wurman) telling of his own experience with this. If I remember correctly, his father showed him that the most important lesson in school was not to *know* all the answers, but to learn *how to find them*.
Thanks for the reminder.
Great quote. Thanks Helen! I’m going to look him up.