That whole “Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue” thing is PR at best, BS at worst.
I don’t have any violets in the yard, but while some of the roses are red, most of ours are not.
This is almost fluorescent pink.
Hot pink, mixed with touches of yellow and lots of white.
And the shapes and curls!
Life on Earth – it can be wonderful. If only we could stop screwing it up for a while.
Filed under Flowers, Photography
The roses next to the driveway have started to explode into color and life. This is a glorious thing.
Compared to some of the neighbors, ours is a small and simple crop.
But so, so many of the houses I’m looking at on Zillow (in a completely different part of SoCal) have none at all in the pictures.
If/when we get one of those houses and move, finding a stretch of the front yard to put in roses will be a priority.
Plenty of time to unpack later.
Seeing this every spring and all summer when you go out or when you come home is more important.
It’s one of those key little things that will change a new house into our forever home.
Roses, and hummingbird feeders. Even if we don’t see hummingbirds on Day One. They’ll find us.
Filed under Flowers, Forever Home, Photography
We saw how they looked spread across the landscape on the freeway medians, center dividers, and through the parks. They looked as good or better one-on-one, up close and personal.
Filed under Flowers, Photography, Travel
Spend a few days driving around the American Southwest and you’ll run into a few of these dudes.
Hopefully not literally – that’ll leave a mark.
They grow all over the place, even in some of the most inhospitable locations.
But these are all parts of decorative landscaping, which is also a very US Southwest sort of thing.
I don’t know if it’s a spring thing or year-round, but most of these seem to have what pass for flowers and/or fruit in the thick and thorny plant world.
Is part of this edible? Or, more practically, fermentable? Probably? Maybe if/when we find the Forever Home (R) in the high desert we can experiment with that.
Okay, I suspect this isn’t quite a “cactus” – I think it’s probably some sort of yucca tree or plant?
Again, not an expert at all. (And it shows!)
Or some sort of palm tree. Whatever, it’s life in a very dry, barren, hostile place.
Like Dr. Ian Malcolm says in “Jurassic Park,” somehow life finds a way.
Filed under Flowers, Photography, Travel
There may be things that disqualify Texas from my “favorite states” list, but this isn’t one of them!
I’m sure this is a “spring thing” and not year ’round, but it is gorgeous now!
Coming eastbound, crossing into El Paso from New Mexico, it’s still pretty barren and desert-y.
But Texas is a REALLY big state, and by the time you start to climb up into the Hill Country in the center of the state, you start to see the wildflowers everywhere.
All along Interstate 10 you’ll see them covering the medians at the side of the road as well as the center dividers, some of which can be a quarter mile or so wide.
Yellow, red, blue, purple, white, orange, every color of the rainbow.
Sometimes it’s whole swatches of one color or the other, more often it was a mixture.
For example…
For the record, while I had a strong urge at a number of spots to pull off onto the side or the road or even the center divider to get out and take pictures, that didn’t seem particularly safe or smart. Although I did see a number of other folks doing exactly that.
But these photos were all taken at a rest stop between Kerrville and San Antonio, on the median between the rest area and the freeway. And yes, I was keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and fire ants as well.
(Those might be two of the aforementioned things that move Texas back down the “favorite states” list…)
Filed under Flowers, Photography, Travel
At our offices (where I actually don’t have an office because I work from home but where I go in once a week or as needed because it’s only ten minutes away and it’s a long story for another day) they have these decorative shrubs all along the back of the parking lot.
I hadn’t really paid any attention to them – to the best of my recollection they’ve always just been your generic office parking lot landscaping green hedge shrub.
But now that spring is springing and everything’s doing their new growth dance, I see that all of the new growth here is this bright red, where all of the old leaves are still dark green.
There are also these flower or see buds scattered amongst the leaves.
The app tells me this is “Red Tip Photinia.” Okay. I’m not sure I see the “red tip” part, it looks like the whole leaves are either green wth no red or red with no green. But that’s probably why I’m not a botanist!
Whatever, I can see why it’s used for decorative landscaping. It’s wonderful!
Filed under Flowers, Photography
I don’t know if this is a crabapple tree or some other kind of fruit.
Whatever it is, I’ve never seen any actual fruit on it in five years here.
But we do get these pretty pink flowers with all of these honkin huge “whiskers” (actually called “pistils” I think?) on them.
The bees and hummingbirds love them.
Today there are only the two blossoms, but give it a week or two, they’ll be everywhere!
Filed under Flowers, Photography
The roses aren’t the only flowers starting to rouse for spring. I went around the side of the house and found this:
As with the roses, this bush has been trimmed back quite a bit by the gardeners over the winter. (After I took all of the Christmas lights off of it…) But the leaves have returned and with it, one pioneering, flaming red bloom.
The humming birds are regular visitors, not just to the feeders in the back yard, but to all of the blooming plants throughout the neighborhood.
In addition to the hibiscus and rose, across the street there are fruit trees (oranges, at least, possibly others) that are just covered in tiny white blossoms now. Not only are they all covered with bees (a great thing in its own right!) but the hummers are swarming all around the neighborhood.
Gotta love spring!
Filed under Flowers, Photography
I had noticed this bud starting to grow over the last week, but when I went out today to get the mail I found that it had finally “popped!”
Classic form, perfect structure, beautiful color.
The only spot of color in a long row of roses that got cut back for the winter around the first of the year. Give it a couple of weeks, there will be roses of a half dozen different colors up and down the row. (When we find the “forever home,” I need to plant roses like this all along the driveway or by the front porch.)
Not noticed until I was going through the pictures for this post – a little friend hiding in the petals! Click on the image to blow it up to full-sized – can you find them?
Filed under Flowers, Photography
The ash tree that had suddenly lost 90%+ of all of its leaves in the last week suddenly is exploding with new growth.
The brown, hard, barren branch endings now have soft green shoots…
…which have smaller shoots…
…which have smaller shoots and seed pods…
…which have smaller budding wannabe leaves.
It’s like a Mandelbrot set brought to life.
Or vice versa.
Filed under Flowers, Photography
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 