The title is an oxymoron on purpose, about wanting to plant something that's considered wild, and maybe is more of a philosophical question than a gardening one: where's the line between doing something and going along with what's already there? Between floating and pushing? We know that some plants grow almost spontaneously and others only appear in your garden if you plant their seeds. We also know that some options in life just appear before you and others have to be pursued. The work afterwards tends to be the same: you have to water, feed, weed, and support everything in the garden if we want flowers and fruit.

This spring, after months of confinement, when they let us out to do a little exercise, I took advantage of Barcelona's electric rental bikes to go up to Montjuïc, the mountain next to the sea that overlooks the city. They had told me about a field of wildflowers and I wanted to see it for myself. I didn't know quite where it was, but I seemed to find myself there almost by accident. (Montjuïc is really big.) I just gaped. It was really gorgeous. And the contrast of the view of the city in the background just served to underscore the beauty of this variety of pretty flowers. Wild ones!

I spent a long time there, taking pictures, and taking advantage of the freedom of the fresh air after so many months inside.

When I got back home, I thought maybe I could have wildflowers at home, and that the easiest way would be by going back to Montjuïc to look for seeds. So three weeks later, I went back and sure enough I found a lot of wilted spent flowers and many seed pods ready for collecting. I don't know what the City government's policy is about picking flower seeds (and wildflower seeds at that but I consider picking dry seed pods which otherwise will just blow away with the wind isn't hurting anyone. I didn't even have to step on the plants to pick them, and in a couple of minutes had whole handfuls.

I brought them home to dry them and label them. If you leave them in a jar, the moisture will make them rot. Unfortunately, after a very few days, I couldn't remember which flowers went with which seed pods, so there wasn't much to label. So I just separated out the ones I recognized (like the poppies and the cornflowers) and saved the rest with descriptive names like "small round gray seeds". But in the end when I planted them it seemed funny to label them that way, so I lost some important information and I decided I would just see what came up. I saved all the seeds in paper envelopes and put them aside to wait for after summer to plant them.

September finally came and I started planting. I should have labeled them but I didn't. And I have all sort of different things coming up. It makes me happy to go up and look at them. I planted too many in some pots and since I'm constitutionally incapble of thinning them, I took out clumps at a time, and carefully separated them and then transplanted them. They've actually done pretty well even though you're not really supposed to transplant poppies, for example.

I didn't think any of them would come up until spring, but they are. And today I had my first flower, a little pink one which PlantNet, the best app I've found for this, identified as silene dioica, and native to the Mediterranean. I'll keep you up to date on how they come out.

Sunday I went back to Montjuïc to see how the flowers were doing there. There were a lot of people having picnics and enjoying the sunshine, but hardly any flowers. Perhaps they'll plant them in the winter, I don't know.

What's clear, though, is that if you go collect seeds, you can have wildflowers at home. And then you'll have more seeds to share with everyone else, and still more flowers. Seems good to me. If you want some seeds, now you know just where to go. And I'll have a whole bunch come June :) If you want to subscribe to this blog, I'll send some to you. Plants are like light, you can share them and still never run out.