cute puzzle... still trying to backsolve the U... another splendid mikey g puzzle... love all the long downs... it's nice when non-meta entries get a chance to really shine... you may tell the hippie gardener i dug it... sad to have had to resort to an anagram generator for 2 of the 8
The "U" one does not come up, sadly, in a standard anagram generator, and I checked! You might have to backsolve for that one! Starts with UR- if you want to play around with it and try to find it just for fun! Glad you can still "dig" it!
KayW 🤓9:16 · 2024-05-25T17:37:22.682Z
Bravo, Mikey! You really ROSE to the occasion on this one. Loved the cluing as always. URSINIA was the hardest to find but at a certain point I knew I needed a U and that helped.
Explanation: The 8 silly themers going across anagram to a one-word name of a flower: MARIGOLD, URSINIA, LAVENDER, CAMELLIA, HYACINTH, ACANTHUS, DAFFODIL, OLEANDER. Their initial letters spell MULCH ADO (har har), a nod to the Shakespearean play whose full 4-word title (with initial word punned) - MULCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING - becomes the answer to our meta. Let the Shakespearean puns below commence!
Ah. I misunderstood the prompt. I thought you meant a pun on the puzzles title so "(pun on garden) of wildflowers". I got MULCH ADO and figured as it didn't anagram it was a jokey clue to an anagram of a flower and the flower would be the play. It was frustrating as I without cross clues I really couldn't figure what the jokey answer to "Mulch Ado" (not to mention there was no answer). Then I muttered "Mulch Ado" aloud and... that was that.
Ohhh. Yeah, I didn't anticipate that rabbit hole, I see what you mean!
HeadinHome 🤓8:23 · 2024-05-26T21:48:25.513Z
Another who just skipped the U flower and got it anyway. At first I totally missed seeing some of the questions marks in the clues and had only marigold, lavendar, hyacynth, and daffodil for the longest time, so I figured I just had to wrack my brain to pun up a title. (Thinking the four letters would acrostic to a famous title… MLHD? Nope.)
This whole thing made me think of Keeping up Appearances .. the character Hyacynth and her sisters Violet and Rose.
Trust me, if I were solving this, I would've skipped the "U"!
Bird Lives 17s · 2024-05-26T22:59:25.991Z
Every time I see the name of the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, I think: what if he were alive and writing a televesion sit com like "Seinfeld." It would be Machado about nothing.
But I mean he is already so famous, wasn't he the inspiration for that Gilbert and Sullivan opera?
ELSavage 🤓12:31 · 2024-05-27T03:56:00.477Z
Let out a big groan when I finally got the last piece in place (Ursinia, of course!) I'm pretty good at anagrams, but not as well-versed on flowers. Had to google a few variations on that last one before I hit the right combination.
Well I had a terrible time because I did not know URSINIA and apparently neither did "Anagram Solver", but when I got MLCH ADO, and knowing the source of the puzzle I knew it had to be about something, or in this case about nothing. Fun solve.
Steve M 4s · 2024-05-29T00:58:16.488Z
I initially didn’t use an anagram solver and couldn’t find any flowers! They were well hidden! Anagram solver gave me MARIGOLD, and the rest followed (except for URSINIA). Fun puzzle!
omnilynx 🤓13:03 · 2024-05-29T16:27:36.781Z
I got stuck for a long time on TUNACASH thinking I was supposed to substitute "fi" for "ca" somehow. But after not finding anything similar on the other themed answers I finally went back to the title and realized what the "wild" hint meant.
Meta World Peace 4s · 2024-05-31T23:18:21.616Z
Interesting that Merriam-Webster won't commit to an etymology for mulch, leaving it at "perhaps irregular from English dialect melch (soft, mild)." And fitting that the difficulty this week was... melch!
This whole thing made me think of Keeping up Appearances .. the character Hyacynth and her sisters Violet and Rose.