Even Dr. Fronkensteen Had His Off Days.

My creation was killed, however, not by an angry mob of torch-wielding villagers (they rather liked it, as it turns out) but by a single person: the school's headmaster.

For my winter annual display at the front gate, I decided on borders of alternating color in the beds. Think of a rectangle inside a rectangle inside a rectangle inside... The outer rectangle was lemon yellow Viola. The line inside that was white Viola. Next I repeated the lemon yellow. For a change of pace, and to use larger plants so I wouldn't have to blow my whole budget on tiny flowers, I repeated the white but with flowering cabbage. Then I used purple flowering cabbage. I kept alternating those until I reached the centers of the planters. We don't have a digital camera at work (and then I would have to figure out how to post the pictures here), but the effect was something like this.

I had run my choice by Skippy (the blog name I have settled on for my boss) before buying the plants. I had originally thought of trying rainbow chard or some of this peacock kale, but he advised me not to go too wild and to use the cabbages. It turns out even he underestimated the headmaster. Our client called me and said that the headmaster has "about 0.01% tolerance of change". Wow, I've managed to find someone more resistant to change than me!

So, we ripped out the cabbbages and replaced them with this mix of pansies in the school colors. Now I'm hunting new places on campus to hide the homeless cabbages.