Horto in Urbs.

Which is the Chicago Parks motto, meaning Garden in a City.  This is the opposite of Chicago's motto, which is Urbs in Horto, city in a garden.  

On my back deck, I have my own garden in a city.  It's comprised of flowers which my mom helped me pick out and plant, as she did last year as well (my first summer in this house).  This year, I added some of my own plants, some seedlings which I started inside back in February or March.  Out of the 6 different flowers I planted back then (including some candy cane striped zinnias - I was really disappointed that they never sprouted) I had only 2 viable plants: some white marigolds and 2 (out of 8 possible) morning glory plants, which I proceeded to put outside while it was still cold and I had given up for dead.  

I could tell that the marigolds were going to be fine and when they started flowering in early July they proved me right.  Now they are about 2 feet high and can barely support themselves (you can see them on the left in the above photo).  I'm not normally a big marigold fan, but these have been very satisfying flowers.  

I was ready to throw out the morning glories, but my mother said they would be fine and she was certainly right.  Some people call morning glories weeds, but a weed is really just any flower that you don't want growing, and I did want these to grow.  Grow they did - covering my trellis better than either of the honeysuckle bushes I had bought to fill up that trellis.  And about a week ago I noticed we had our first blooms.  One thing I love about them, and my African daisies do the same thing: they curl up for the night.  All of these flowers are living and breathing, of course, but there's something even more human about these flowers that go to bed and wake up each day, and don't really wake up on those cloudy days, just like us.