In My Garden

I love flowers that self seed from year to year. Last year I planted several Nicotiana plants but this year, I didn't get around to buying any. Luckily I didn't need to as I have several plants that have volunteered from seeds dropped from last year's flowers.

Nicotiana always makes me think of my late father. He was a plant pathologist and when I was growing up he would often bring home plants grown in his lab that he had been using for experimentation. Nicotiana was one of those plants. Because he grew so much of it for his experiments, he always planted some in our flower beds. He always liked pointing out that Nicotiana is a member of the tobacco family. Actually that's why he was using it in his work. One of the plant diseases he was working on was Tobacco Mosaic Virus, a plant disease that affects a lot of plants, including tomatoes and other members of the solanaceae family. In his work he would often inoculate plants with diseases, like TMV to see which plants were resistant and what could be done to hinder the effects of the virus. I guess because Nicotiana is a fast and easy grower, it was a perfect test subject for witnessing the effects of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus. My dad could talk for hours about this stuff, and I always use to wish that I had his brains to be able to understand all of the things he was telling me.