Blue-eyed Mary, Dog. See a Pattern?

 Blue-eyed Mary, Collinsia verna, is a member of the Scrophularidaceae, or Figwort family, which includes many nice plants like turtlehead and obedient plant and that pretty yellow and orange plant called butter and eggs. Collinsia is a "winter annual." That means its seeds drop in summer, germinate in fall and live over the winter, blooming the next spring.

It's not common, and there's only one place we know of to see it, and that's Newell's Run, not very far as the pileated woodpecker flies from our place. It needs very rich, loamy slopes and dappled sun.

I find its "true blue" lower petals absolutely disarming. The individual flowers are very small, but taken all together, they form drifts of misty blue which seem to flow down the steep hillsides where it grows best.

You begin to see the effect of a lot of Mary growing together.

Step back, and see a whole woodland full of it, and you have to rub your eyes...am I really seeing that blue in the understory? Well, that really intense blue is a tarp there in front of the huntin' dog house. But the rest is hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of tiny blue and white flowers.

with a little dark blue phlox thrown in. Mary is BLUE. Phlox is more lavender.

It's such a short time that blue-eyed Mary's blooming--you have to get out in the third week of April or you might miss it altogether. 

Oh look. Chet in the trillium.

 And Chet Baker in the golden ragwort (Senecio obovata)

And Chet along the phloxy bank

and listening for squirtles and chiptymunks on a sheer cliff

and listening to me when I tell him not to even think about going down there.

A red-bellied woodpecker quirrks out his love song in the dappled spring woods

and redbud throws a haze of rose pink in the understory

and Shila and Diane and I are in hog heaven on this perfect spring day

in this perfect spring woodland

with a trifecta of Trillium grandiflorum, Collinsia verna and Phlox divaricata.

I like telling people that wild ginger (Asarum canadense) is ant-pollinated and its seeds are ant-dispersed. Why else would its little red flowers be held just at ground level, with handy ant ramps? Ant ramps. I'm getting a vision of ants cooking ramps in an underground kitchen. Vented, I hope.

More wildflowers and dog anon.