Here's something that I recently discovered from a neighbor - chives! They produce the most attractive purple flowers on the end of upright stems (and of course the stems are edible, too). They're the perfect perennial - and yet they're not marketed as such. Last spring I noticed a neighbor had these great mounds of purple flowers in her garden, but I had no idea what they were. One day I noticed her tending her flower beds as I drove by, so I stopped to introduce myself, only to discover she spoke virtually no English. So I walked over to the flower and asked "What is this" by shrugging my shoulders and giving her a perplexed expression. "Chive" was all she said, with a similar shrug. Well, I had no idea! So at the end of last summer I was at a nursery that had lots of herbs, and asked if they had any chives. The nursery manager looked around but couldn't find any, and commented that they must have sold out. But then she noticed a specimen growing wild in the gravel where it had self-sewn, so she leaned over, grabbed it by the base and yanked it out of the soil, then stuck it in a pot, and gave it to me. And that plant is the one shown here 9 months later.
