Everyone becomes a gardener for at least 45 minutes each spring. During that time, a person who is otherwise completely uninterested in annual plants makes an impulse purchase at the nursery or super market of some colorful lovely that catches his or her eye, gets it home, gets it to the general vicinity of the area they had in mind for it—patio or front porch—may water it once, and may even haul out some old bag of soil and plant it! Then it quite possibly is left to its own devices for the next month or two, and in late July or August, when the plant is more of a hot mess than a fresh lovely, it is discarded.