Flowers in the Rain

There's no such thing as bad weather. Only bad gear.

Or a bad attitude about the weather. 

Now I'd ameliorate this maxim by saying that I consider horizontal freezing rain to be bad weather, bad enough to keep me in. But a light drizzle is nothing. Kind of nice, actually, as long as you've remembered to put a Ziploc in your pocket for your iPhone, which of course I hadn't. My alternate plan if it got too bad was to stick this delicate electronic marvel in somebody's mailbox until the rain was over, continue my run and pick it up on the way home. That'd work too.

So I went out on this late June morning without a care though it was threatening rain. I like the way the colors of flowers sing in overcast dark.  The rain-spangled petals of Rosa carolina. 

Now that would be a good name for a girl, good middle name too. Great name, actually. You could call her Rosa or Rose or Caroline, or Carolina, or Lina, or...Hmm. Nope, too late to make another one. I mean, technically I still could, but I don't want to. I like the one we have. She turned out well. And can't imagine the whole highchair/diaper/bassinet/crib scene again. No such thing as bad babies. Only bad gear.

I like her guy too. Wouldn't change anything on that one.

Rainy day chicory is the best chicory. It's got the deepest color. It's all temperature and light dependent. The warmer and brighter it is, the paler the color. Get a coolish dark day, and you get this amazing violet. 

I kept trying to catch an image that says just how much butterflyweed is in this field. SCHTUNS.

And the photos just don't do it justice. Especially this one. I could see the flowers, but the camera just couldn't. The general orange haze resolved into hundreds of glorious glowing plants. 

Purple-top grass is such an awesome complement to the embers. 

Come on little Bacon, get up in there and punctuate this composition with your inkspot.

The plants, robust and magnificent. Innocent of butterflies today, but it wasn't really butterfly weather after all. I finally saw my first monarch around our common milkweed on July 2. I couldn't stop grinning.

For Hodge, the first Queen Anne's lace I found. I do love the stuff, alien and all. It's so fine with chicory. Aliens should stick together, and they often do.

Chet and I pause by some hayrolls. Farmer Bob gathered them all up and put them in a neat row. He does it every year. Flat out ruins my compositions, he does, but for the glorious few days that they're sprinkled over the voluptuous hills, I take as many photos as I can.

I lift Chet back down and he snuffles and whuffs in the grass. Mether. Look here. Mether.

What is it, Bacon? Oh!! How lovely!! Thank you, sweetheart! I thought you were eating bunny poop.

The first jewelbox of the morning, gift of the rain. It was to be a three-turtle day for me. I'll tell you about it Sunday.

Heading Home in Flat Light

We move on. The light has changed, flattened as the sun has gone behind a layer of clouds. It reveals the landscape without shadows. Flat light can be the best for flower photography, for many things. I love it for bird photography. No dark branch shadows bisecting my tanager, thank you.

The mist that decorated the holler earlier is gone now.

As are the mackerel clouds of morning. I'll go back this way. The roof of the Toothless Lady peeks out over the hay.

 There she is, a cup plant (Silphium) standing guard, showing its lovely perfoliate leaves and bud a-coming.

In the flat light, her ravaged form shows up even better, set off by the smoky blues of breathing plants. I'm told that the blue of distant hills is caused by the haze of hydrocarbons,  byproducts of photosynthesis.

Artists call the blueing out of far horizons "atmospheric perspective." Things get bluer as you go farther away. I remember my painter friend Jim Coe, who has actually had schooling in painting, complimenting me on a landscape. "You're organizing your greens very well." I still love that, though I had to ask him what he meant at the time. He meant that I was dulling out my greens appropriately as they moved from the foreground to the back.

Flat light reveals the Toothless Lady's contents, amongst them a Barcolounger and a galvanized washtub. 

It's time to go home, in flat light, over these rumpled hills.

Field daisies, red clover, and crown vetch. Not a one of them native, but lovely nonetheless, especially in this light, at this hour. Black dot on curve: leading the way.