That’s all well and good, except that the birds that come to the who-shot-john are birds that are not in any of the bird books. Birds whose colors derive from some other spectrum. And the birds fight over the who-shot-john. Savagely. To the death sometimes. Deep into the night.

“When the first English-speaking settlers arrived in what is now West Texas, they were so entranced by the frothy sprays of off-white that hid the rocks they rushed to stub their toes upon (but just at first!), they called that delicate stone-hugging perennial olordylordia. If you have rocks, why dig them up? Veil them with this hardy survivor of pioneer days—and don’t worry, the olordylordia will find soil, somewhere. Just toss the seeds and sit back.”

Yes. The seeds. And the frothy phase. And then, after the froth, olordylordia sends out gangly stalks bearing sentient-looking pods that burst all at once to scatter dense clouds of seeds all over your property and your neighbors’ and your neighbors’ neighbors’, and pretty soon all those neighbors are pounding on your door yelling about how, after enduring a thirty-year epidemic of olordylordia, they had just about got it stamped out at last and here you are loosing another plague of olordylordia upon the whole vicinity and what are you going to do about it?

Or maybe plants do things for you that they don’t for me, and don’t do things to you that they do to me. Maybe your plumbers’ balm came out looking exactly like the pictures in the catalogue, and when squeezed its leaves do in fact yield a nice-smelling ointment-like stuff that soothes scraped knuckles and in a pinch may be used as grout. Maybe “sweet Bessemer” did not turn out, in your case, to be a typographical error, and does smell sweet, not sweaty. Maybe your Helvetian periculosa didn’t go all ingrown and threaten the basement. Maybe I just have a lurid thumb.

But tell me this: Is it the breeze that’s making those throttleberries press up against my window screen here—pressing, pressing, harder, harder—or their own volition?