My husband gave this mystery flower a compliment. He said it looks like “a real flower.” That is, it looks something that a person might deliberately grow in a garden. I agree that it’s pretty, but it reminds me a little bit of Mystery Flower #1, which I found growing in a yard with poor-quality soil, so it may be just another weed.
My best guess at the identity of this mystery flower is in the comments.
As I’ve mentioned before, I love violets.
And I thought I knew them well. Then I discovered, as with many things in life, I didn’t know them at all. Every year, I saw them and said, “I like them.” I didn’t look any closer. I didn’t make them a part of my life. Not since I was a child, when I made violet syrup, have I given them the attention they deserve. Not until this year, that is.
I have been out to admire and photograph them every day since they started blooming, and I have learned many things. First, I learned that violets spread quickly. I had known it, but I had never witnessed it. Last spring, I couldn’t have imagined how they’d come to dominate the yard. They moved up the hill as if scattered by the very hand of God.
I also learned that violets are difficult to photograph. Each violet is a character, and usually an unphotogenic one. I guess that’s something the violet and I have in common. I’m not photogenic either. My face looks best animated. Catch it at any one moment and it’s not always so pretty. I had to take dozens of violet photos just to capture a few decent ones. And I discovered, as I clicked away, that I had four types of violets in my yard (big whites, little whites, dog violets, and common blues). Now, let me introduce some of them to you.
First, the friendliest of all, the laughing violet. The full sun, which did me no favors as I was snapping photos, just made her smile more.
The delicate, innocent, tiny white violet. She doesn't know what fear is.
The scared violet. He's even afraid of the camera.
Here, the everyman of violets. He's an ordinary, likable guy, but maybe just a tad depressed. Maybe he had his heart broken...
...and maybe it was by someone like this flirty girl, another common blue.
I am sorry to say that when I linked to my first violet post (see first sentence), I found that I had failed to keep a promise. I may have to do something about that. We’ll see. In the meantime, the violets are still blooming. They are in their decline now, fading, petals slightly tattered, but they haven’t quite lost their charm. Like people, who may lose their looks as they age, these violets still have stories to tell, and I will be there to listen and learn.
I’m not a professional photographer. I don’t have professional gear. I use an older digital camera with autofocus and a macro feature. I don’t have serious photo-editing software on my computer, nor do I know how to properly crop and adjust colors anyway. So I’m not sure what I do with pictures can be called photography.
By going out every day and snapping pictures of the things I find, am I trying to be a photographer? That is, am I trying to create pictures as art? I’m not sure. I think what I’m trying to do is to see nature from different points of view. Too often we just look down at the ground and dismiss what we see. And why not? The things there are small, and when viewed from above, they often appear only two-dimensional. I want to imagine what it would be like to be an ant, to see a flower as a skyscraper, its gigantic petals arrayed across the broad blue sky.
I’m on the hunt for that perfect scene, “created by Nature, captured by me.” If I had an expensive camera, would it help me find the scene? Would it help me appreciate it more? Probably not. It might help me capture the scene in better color and more detail, though. So, if I ever reach that point at which I start consistently capturing scenes as I visualize them in my mind, then perhaps a better camera would be in order. Then I might say I was indulging in art. For now, it’s more of a quest.
So I keep hunting, looking for a good picture in every flower I see, even the weeds. We have an abundance of dandelions in our yard. My husband is preparing to wage war on them. Me, I am adoring them. How can you not admire the dandelion’s color when contrasted with violets or a summer sky? How can you not marvel at its structure? And if you look close enough, ignoring its garish outer appearance, how can you not admire its delicacy?
These bluets in the back yard are the most cheerful things I’ve seen in a long time. While looking for information about bluets online, I came across an article that says they’re ideal for rock gardens. Isn’t that fortuitous since I’m currently in the process of planning a rock garden?
This is a forsythia flower glorying in the late afternoon sun. You can’t help but admire its sunny personality, not to mention its persistence. At some point my husband cut this bush back so far that I didn’t even know we had forsythia in the yard, and I believe his intent was to kill it. Now look at it!
Forsythia is like that, though. It grows like a weed, and I can remember one place where it grew so big and so ugly that it almost turned me against the plant forever. It was in my parents’ back yard, near the fence that separated us from the neighbors that had the worst dog ever. It was like a jungle of forsythia there. And don’t even get me started on the dog. I haven’t liked dogs much since, either.
But this yellow fellow is so pretty, I may have to forgive forsythia for all its past sins. It just needs a strong guiding hand, someone to keep it in line.
“Hey, fellow. You grow so much as an inch out of line and my husband will cut you back within an inch of your life!”
Do you think this forsythia will behave itself?
As I’ve mentioned before, the previous owners of our house didn’t exactly wear themselves out keeping up the old place. The yard, completely neglected for however many years, is in sorry shape, but there are some bright spots here and there. Take this daffodil for example. It’s a very fancy daffodil, a testament to the care that some long-since-relocated gardener once took of the landscape. Let this pretty flower also stand as a symbol of what we hope to do here. We’re going to make this yard beautiful again. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but soon. Just give us some time to plan and to plant, and it will be a garden paradise.
When I was about 7 months pregnant with Marshall, my husband and I took a hike in the woods and up a very steep hill. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s steep. It used to be a ski area.
Maybe we were nuts to tackle it during my third trimester. Falling would have been very bad, and I could just imagine my gynecologist berating me for putting my baby at risk. But I was proud of the fact that I could still climb a hill, and I needed the exercise. I was as careful as I could be.
The reason I mention this story is that near the top of the hill, there was a sunny area covered by flowering shrubs. The flowers were pretty and I wondered what they were. When I came home, I looked them up in my field guide to North American plants and decided that they had to be either blueberry or bearberry.
Later that year, I discovered a blueberry bush in my own yard. I was thrilled! Though I never got to eat any of the fruit (it was mostly gone before it was fully ripe), I knew the bush could act as a gauge, telling me when the local blueberries were ripe.
As you can see from the pictures, my gauge plant is in bloom and getting itself pollinated. The fruit is on the way!
This year, if I can find a big patch of blueberries, I might be able to pick enough wild blueberries to make blueberry pancakes. So I’m thinking about those bushes, not to mention some other promising areas of shrubbery up in the woods behind the house, and hoping.
Wishing, wishing, wishing for wild blueberry pancakes!
The spring is here and the plants are all coming back to life. I want to share some of the pictures I’ve taken over the past few weeks. Expect to see them posted under the name SITY (Seen in the Yard).
My man isn’t rich, but he has tons of money.
He keeps it in bags, until the bags break.
Ka-ching! Ka-chang! The coins hit the floor.
There’s money on the ground. Oh no!
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