The $15 echinacea weed

I wanted a couple Cecile Brunner climbing roses and found a company that offered them online at a price better than the local nursery where I got the last one. There were a couple of echinacea that caught my eye. I don't know that I'd ever seen them in a garden before. They were brilliant in the online photos. Okay, I'll get a couple of those, at $7.50 a piece.

The roses came first. They've done well. Nice stuff.

The two echinacea showed up a couple of months later in dinky pots, new growth just starting to emerge. I planted them the next day in good soil.

I had expected more growth up front. Then I observed that what growth there was was getting consumed. Snails, or what? I put out some killer bait and identified the culprit: sow bugs. Wow, a lot of them. I was in time to save one of the plants, but not the other.

The one that remained was really slow in developing leaves. After several weeks, I saw a bud forming. A bud. I pinched it off and pinched off some of the top growth, assuming that that would encourage branching and more buds (as I've seen happen on my cosmos, etc). Weeks later, it barely grew new growth and put out one new bud. Okay, I'll let that one bloom, I told myself.

It was colorful. But there was just flower. And then from there it was downhill to what you see here. Will it come back in amazing form next year? They certainly won't be using this for their catalog photo.