Nasturtiums in unusual places

One of the things I enjoy the most about or garden is taking a stroll and seeing what's new or surprising. I tend to be somewhat of a guided laissez-faire, serendipitous gardener. I let plants go to seed, wait to see where they come up, remove the ones that aren't where I want them, and fill in the bare spots with things I think will be attractive in those spots. 

Since I've been doing this for several years now, I often find plants growing in areas where I didn't plant them. This morning I spotted nasturtiums growing up a trellis intended for a snail vine, and nasturtiums springing from the rocks surrounding one of our ponds.

Nasturtiums and hollyhocks are the most prolific of my "let it be" plants, but this time of year I also find larkspur and lettuce in various locations. My most unusual discovery was a viola growing in the nonplanted, nonwatered gravel pathways.

Resilience

I found this viola growing in the unwatered, unfertilized gravel part of our yard, which is regularly treated with a pre-emergent herbicide. I didn't plant violas this year; they don't usually do very well for me, and besides this is the wrong time of the year for them. In the Phoenix area, they should be planted in late fall for early spring blooming. I don't know where it came from, or how it managed to take root in the gravel, much less bloom, but it did.

Partly because I just watched "The Pursuit of Happyness" for the first time, I started thinking about resilience. Why is it that some people, who seemingly have all the cards stacked against them, are able to overcome such incredible hardship and not only survive, but thrive? Other people, who are dealt a pretty good hand in life, crumple and fall at the first ill wind that blows their way. It's not that adversity causes resilience, or being born with a silver spoon in one's mouth causes failure. If you could graph human lives as a set of Cartesian coordinates, where the x axis denotes easy vs hard circumstances/events, and the y axis denotes success/happiness with failure/despondency, there would be plenty of people in all four quadrants. I'd expect people to be in quadrants I and III; it's the ones in quadrants II and IV that I wonder about.

There are plants I've carefully researched, planted in a well-tilled area with all the weeds removed, watered and fertilized and mulched, and they never do much. Then there are plants like the viola, growing up through the gravel, and blooming against all odds. There is much that is mysterious about life, whether it be plants or people.