Neat story! I suspect you'll do some more 'visiting' with THAT treasure! Keep us posted.
J.D.

My kind of lady, Sylvia, give her my best!!!! Sounds as if the whole family has a great sense of humor, and boy, can that get us through some tough times!!! Report to us often on the comings and goings of May. God bless her.

She sounds like a person I would enjoy getting to know. Aren't you lucky to have met her?

Yes! you are very lucky,
I wish I had somebody like that to enjoy their wisdom of life. I would try and drop by once in awhile.
she sounds likea true Texas Gardener !
Olgaflowers,

I hope she invited you to come back. Sounds like you had a great time with her.
I hope if I live to be that age I'll still be able to garden.

If you do get to know her maybe she'd like to join us for the swaps.

I hope I'm like that when I am her age - still outside enjoying my garden and actually doing the work myself. It sounds like the two of you will get along great!

What a treasure she is and I am so glad you got to meet her

Great story, times like this make a fellow gardener fill all warm inside - Have a blessed day...
Rigo74

Wonderful! See, digging in someone else's trash is a 'good thing'! (My hubby hates this:). What a Texas Treasure-how great of you to stop and listen, may we all do the same and really soak up all the great life our elders have to share with us. CJ

"digging in someone else's trash is a 'good thing'"

cj, I just tell myself it's karma.

When I was growing up, my mother had a friend who was a florist.

One day when my mother drove by Celeste's house/shop, she saw a zillion pots of mums sitting at the curb for the trash man.

Celeste told her that the plants had been forced to bloom for football corsages, & that she was finished with them;
it was cheaper for her to buy new ones next year than to coddle these over-stressed plants....
& she told my mother to take all the plants she wanted.

thought I was gonna die of embarrassment.

Every night-before-trash-day, my mother found some reason to run an errand that, coincidentally, took her right past Celeste's shop, & she *always* went through the floral "trash".

& would she *ever* go by herself?

Noooooo...Sylvia had to go with her.

I was mortified, & I swore I'd never do anything like that ever again.

Karma hears you when you say things like that.

I truly believe that one man's trash is another's treasure. I would dig through "interesting" trash in a heartbeat.

"I was mortified, & I swore I'd never do anything like that ever again." LOL Yet there you were! Eyeballing someone's trash!! :) Famous last words-I love it! I call it the wisdom of age, getting caught isn't such a big deal anymore:).

My grandma (the ultimate lady) cared for many cemetery headstones, and most of her flowers came from the burn barrel at the cemetery. I started young digging out pretty flowers. I too like to cruse by on trash day, and my poor husband just dies. I now knock first (or try to;)
you meet the neatest people that way. CJ

Congrats on your new friend, Sylvia.

I love dumpster diving and curb shopping. Most people just wouldn't believe what you can find.

I brought home 12 baskets of spider plants about a year ago.
They were all sun burned and looked horrible, but they were pitiful sitting by the road. I am a little bit of a plant snob...normally wouldn't give a spider plant a second thought, but I brought these home. Sat them in the shade and watered them. They were gorgeous this year. They have certainly paid back my small kindness ten fold!!

so see, Marilyn, you did a kindness for the plants & expanded the variety in your garden at the same time!

I just love this kind of stuff.

A few weeks ago, I picked up 5 or 6 bags of mulch-
someone just raked it up & bagged it & set it out for the landfill!

Inside one of the bags were 3 pairs of new garden gloves.

My best haul, though, was the summer that I picked up a bag of bulbs that turned out to be spider lilies.
a whole bag of 'em!

& picking up this stuff is a kindness for life on earth, too, keeping it out of the landfill as well as returning it to enrich the earth.

so I hereby encourage everyone to go out the night before the trash trucks come through your neighborhood & look for garden treasures!

Sylvia, my neighbors do not garden, and I would have to go to Flower Mound or Highland Village to look for these treasures --- think someone may call the police on me????

Here's a link to a post on the Soil Compost & Mulch Forum that gives tips for collecting OPBL (Other People's Bagged Leaves);

It's helpful for all kinds of "lurking"!

Here is a link that might be useful: Leaf-Lurking Tips

I remember reading that, Sylvia ----- thanks !!!