Hardy

or not in the seasonal sense, I don't know, but it has flourished on my porch in its little pot inside a bucket. Sensitive to drought as it seems to be, we strive to keep it moist, and it rewards us with a spray of  branches with tiny purple blossoms much visited by bumblebees.

Wait, now I do know what it is. I showed a photo to my friend Kasa who loves challenges like this and found it (I don't know how) on a website for Texas gardeners: it's the Brazilian Sky Flower, also known as the Golden Dewdrop because of its tiny golden stone fruit, but formally called Duranta erecta.

Named or nameless, this cheapo Home Depot plant is a pleasure to watch. The profusion of tiny flowers dangling at the end of pendulous racemes and the busy solicitude of the bees tucking into each whorled four petal purple flower (and sometimes fanning or bumping into me in the process), indeed the whole large reach and flourish of the plant, all serve to make it good company when I sit having breakfast outside, or any time in the day.

Perhaps I should treat you, Sky Flower, with more ceremony now that we've been introduced. (In fact, the sky reference seems apt in the way your tiny flowers at the end of their stalks play in the wind.) And Krsa's no-nonsense about how you're going to need to be pruned and fertilized and, above all, brought in before it gets too cold. I can see I'll have to take pains not to make sure you survive. Our lolling together days may be drawing to a close.

So let's make a date now, you and me (and bees) that, come Spring, we'll get together again for good times on the back porch--and we'll invite Kasa too.