As Flaubert said …

Flaubert said, to make anything interesting, you simply have to look at it long enough.   I never thought much about lobelias – I like them in summer flowing out of their pots, a cheery background to all the rest of the garden.  I buy em in and pull em out, summer and autumn – annuals are lightweights, not stayers.

Then out of their hundreds of tiny blue flowers I looked at one. It had a face – slanting white eyebrows and black mouth with a droopy three pronged white beard to summon insects in, and I had never noticed.

The platycodons are flowering, and I wait as the bud swells – it has the sheen of the taut skin over a woman’s pregnant belly – and then opens, slowly, it’s not in a hurry, to show the blue five pointed star, holding the anthers and another central white star of stigma.  It’s theatre.

Interesting?  More than that.  Both hold me in their world.