Strange Plants

[This post brought to you by the purse cam.  It has been a camera with a mission—capturing what we see here to record it on the blog.]

So people in Oregon seem to like strange plants.  It could be that I have just forgotten what plants people landscape with in North Carolina.  But I think I would have remembered if there was one of these on every corner, as there seems to be here.

My neighbors have one in their front yard so that I can be entertained by it on a daily basis.  (Notice the odd little droopy bush/tree behind it.)

There seem to be a lot of japenese maples here.  They do have an interesting shape and they’re super pretty in the fall, but I need to be sure that ours don’t end up looking like Cousin It.

Some of the strange plant sightings are just a conjunction of natural circumstances.  I’ve seen several times what happens when the moss on a tree gets really thick.  Yep—ferns start growing out of the moss on the branches of the trees.

Some plants are so strange it’s hard to know what went wrong where.  This is a couple of blocks away from us.  Did the owners just think “That little rectangle of dirt is too hard to deal with it, so we’ll take care of it this way”????

And fortunately for all of us, it’s a matched set of strange/ugly bushes, though you can’t see the true (wide) beauty in this picture.

The funny thing is that I haven’t seen any plant manicuring going on, but it must be happening sometime…

Many of the trees here seem to be straight out of Dr. Suess-land.

Last, but certainly not least---