Wildflower Safari!

It's that time of year again. Wildflowers are coming out. Everything's about two weeks late. It's kind of disorienting. Red-eyed vireos singing in leafless trees. But the wildflowers are coming along nicely.

I love, love, love taking friends out on wildflower safaris. 

From left: Sara, Kelly, Murr and moi. Cackling. 

Murr, holding a chickadee nest. For her take on chickadee sex, go to her fabulous blog. 

Bluets. Honesty. Quaker Ladies. Call them what you will, I love them. There is a man who lives down our county road who weedwhacks the bluets that grow on a bare bank in front of his house. He will get his just reward in Purgatory, for bluets hurt no one. Neither does honesty, properly and kindly administered. 

There is blue, and then there is BLUE. Blue-eyed Mary is BLUE. Oh, what a blue, the kind of blue that home gardeners lust after but almost never achieve. Only delphiniums approach this blue, and those are hard to grow in Ohio. I know, because I've probably bought two dozen delphiniums over the years, only to have them rot in our rainy winters. 

Blue-eyed Mary is an annual that grows in misty blue drifts down rich slopes, spilling like smoke into pastures.

I never tire of oohing over it.

Blue phlox blooms at the same time. But there's blue, and then there's blue, and I'm sorry, Phlox, but you're only almost blue.

Blue larkspur, same deal. You're royal purple. Chet Baker for scale. 

The Bacon loves a good wildflower safari as much as the next guy. He just likes to come along and sniff out new places, harass new squirtles and chiptymunks. 

Jacob's Ladder.

Another kingly larkspur. There was more of it this year than ever. We were thrilled to see it had spread so widely.

I couldn't resist shooting this gorgeous bank of Trillium grandiflorum, with some idiot's old mattress flumped down on it. Around these parts, a steep slope is just an invitation to pitch the big stuff you're too lazy to take to the dump.

If I could have hauled it away I would have, but rain-soaked mattresses are more than I can handle. I tried not to think of the trillium trying to come up beneath it. Dang it!!

 Back home, my zygocactus is going absolutely bu-freakin'-onkers. After an initial winter bud drop, it has decided it loves, loves, loves the greenhouse. I brought it up to the kitchen table for a little house vacation, because I didn't want to miss a minute of its fuchsia perfection. Just FYI it is in a great big pot with dense moist soil. Seemed like what it wanted.

 I like this dreamy off-kilter shot of the wildflowers of Newell's Run.

Yes, it is a fine thing to meet them when and where they're blooming. I recommend it. Get out there, now!