On this March afternoon, clouds drift in sullen white-gray flocks, west to east. The sodden remains of last week’s blizzard litter the ground in ragged drifts, their undersides dissolving to slush faster than the tops melt under a disinterested sun. The warming ground and moisture are welcome, but the muck and disarray, on the heels of this very long winter, are not welcoming.
If I want greenery and the promise of another season, I won’t find it outdoors this week, not here…
Fourteen degrees as a daytime high is somewhat easier to take now that the calendar reads December…even if that same calendar assures me that winter is, technically, still more than two weeks away. We are on the far side of fall. The autumnal show is over: the leaves, having revealed their not-green alter egos, have…
The color of the wood caught my eye. Dull gold? Whitened tan? Honeyed beige? Light, in any event, blanched against the worn grasses and graying woodland litter. We were on the way back from a little hike, about a quarter of a mile east of the house. I detoured uphill to investigate, and when I…
January last seems impossibly distant. Memories from back then are round-edged and worn, like relics of a lost civilization. The pandemic was dawning, of course, although few of us in this country had a clue what was to come. Lockdowns, masks, grimly mounting death tolls? Other people’s burdens, far away. I was more concerned with…
Well, vacations—both the planned of July and the unplanned of August—are over: time to get back to writing work. What better way to get back into the routine than to reflect on the break? About not writing in August, there’s nothing to say other than it happened. As for the July blog vacation, I recognize…
If you’ve been following this series of blog posts featuring the wildflowers blooming in our part of Colorado this July, you may have noticed a relative dearth of the classic and recognizable form commonly referred to as sunflowers. The local sunflower types tend to come out later in the summer; at our altitude, many are…
Thirty days ago, I was inspired to blog the bloom by a prolific little flower I called “the little purple penstemon that blooms earlier than most of the penstemons” (kindly identified as P. virens by Susan J. Tweit in the comments to that post). Those plants have now gone to seed, but their larger penstemon compatriots…
Not all of our wildflowers insist on living “wild.” Pioneer plants are the first to colonize disturbed ground, including construction sites and burn areas. They help recover disturbed soil by stabilizing against erosion and shading tender seedlings. What makes them pioneers rather than weeds is their willingness to share space: rather than simply taking over…
Friends, the month of July is running out of days faster than I am running out of flowers to post. Here, then, is a sampling of the flowers from the Astragulus genus. By sharing them as a group, I’m able to show you more of the floral abundance and variety, whilst avoiding any pretense of…
The conventional definition of a weed is a plant s growing where it’s not wanted. By that subjective measure, any of the twenty-six wildflowers featured on this blog over the past few weeks might qualify as a weed if it’s in the “wrong” spot. More often, I suspect, we think of weeds as non-native or…