It always amazes me to see what plants will do to increase their chance of survival. This has been a particularly good summer for weeds, and I keep finding tall ones that have escaped my attention for weeks because they blended in so nicely with the plants around them.
I pulled these out of one of my daylily beds. You can see that the leaves are grass-like just like daylily leaves:
And this little white-flowering weed keeps popping up in my petunias, but I miss it until it blooms because the leaves are similar to petunia leaves:
Plants also adapt based on their growing companions. I learned this years ago when sprouting plants from seed indoors. If I take two packs of Dreamland zinnia seedlings (that mature at 12 inches) and leave one under the growing lights in a tray with other Dreamland zinnias but put the second pack in a tray with zinnias that will eventually grow 40 inches tall, the pack of Dreamland zinnias that grows with the tall zinnias will keep up with them. That means when I pull the packs out of their trays after several weeks, the Dreamland zinnias that grew in the tray with the tall zinnias may be as much as 6 to 8 inches taller than the Dreamland zinnias that grew among the other Dreamlands–even though all the Dreamland seeds were sown on the same day and the plants all sat under the same grow lights.
I recently noticed a similar phenomenon outside. In May I planted some tall zinnias next to our screen porch where my Orienpet lilies grow. My Orienpets got a little crazy this summer and some hit 7 feet tall. The other day I noticed some of my Benary zinnias trying to compete. They are supposed to grow 40 to 50 inches tall, but many of them were blooming at over six feet tall while hanging out with the morning glories that climbed the Orienpets.
