Category Archives: Flowers

I’m sure that so many of you feel the same way. I hope that for all of us on the big things (COVID, Ukraine, the GQP) get better, or at least stop getting worse, or at a very minimum slow down in how fast they’re getting worse. I hope for each of you that the new week and start of the new month are less stressful and easier on your spleen, although I’m not sure that’s going to be the case for me. Nothing life threatening, I’ll live, but time-wise I’m still trying to put eight pounds of pickles into a five-pound pickle bag. The fact that it used to be ten pounds is only mildly comforting.

Sorry, I don’t have any sunflowers growing in the yard – yet. But this beauty popped out over the weekend as the roses realize that spring is almost here, so it will have to do.

Keep breathing. Stay calm. Punch Nazis.

A handful of days last weekend it was up into the 80’s and low 90’s here, but last week was down into the 60’s and low 70’s here, and tonight it’s damp, cloudy, drizzly, and headed for the 40’s. But that didn’t stop this one, brave, solo hibiscus from taking it’s shot at being FIRST to pop and get pollinated!

Don’t think that the hummingbirds don’t appreciate it! First, this is out of sight of where Little Bastard sits and guards the feeders, so they can hit it without being attacked. But it’s also the real stuff, not that artificial concentrate that goes into the feeders.

Give ’em hell, brave solo hibiscus!!

Yep.

That’s it, right there.

It it like that so that the bees can find it, or so that I can?

Does it matter? We both did.

(There’s a theme here the last few days. Yeah, back in “Deadline Days” and there’s not a lot of time, so as I do my “walk around the back yard for two minutes because my watch is yelling at me to step away from the desk” breaks, I’m playing with the new iPhone to see what it can do on the fly with zero prep or planning.)

I’ve heard so many good things about the iPhone 13 macro (close-up) lens – oooh, look, those flowers are blooming again!

Not bad! The camera is probably 1/2 inch or so away from the flower. How close can I get? A bee’s eye view?

Um, okay, that’s pretty amazing. Add to the list to try and play more with this with an actual tripod and planning…

I’m really liking this phone/camera, a lot!

Something related to morning glories, but they’re usually a little more blue.

These have always been more of a lavender color and a much brighter, more vivid shade of purple.

And “morning” glory or not, these prefer the middle of the afternoon to explode with color.

One thing that amazes me is how the blossom colors will vary so widely, even on the same stem or with flowers right next to each other.

They’re also a great draw for the hummingbirds.

It’s amazing what you can see if you keep your eyes open and be open to the experiences around you, even if you’re just dragging the empty trash barrels up from the street!

The color saturation’s pretty good too. Some days it’s better to be lucky than good.

FYI, things seem to be heating up a bit so far as the schedule is concerned, so you might be seeing more of these “one picture, one caption” posts for a while.

We’ll see.

We’ve seen a couple of them, but almost all of them are blooming at some point or the other. Maybe I’ll get back to this year’s crop, but for now we’re hip deep in new birds and various critters…

So I played a bit with focus and depth of field.

Best compromise for an elongated, vertical field.

Foreground…

Middle of the depth of field…

Distant field of view…

Next thing you know, folks will think that I know what I’m doing!

A week or so ago I talked about a new patch of flowers that I had found around the corner of the house, partially hidden from normal view, a surprise after three years of living here.

The little daisy-like flowers on the right-hand side were featured in that earlier post.

Over on the left were more of these – a LOT more.

There are a couple of them down by the mailbox, but I didn’t know what they were. And there are literally just five or six flowers down there. Here there are dozens of them.

I’m not as good with flowers as I am with birds, so I finally dug around today and found a nice online site for ID’s my photography subjects.

These apparently are “evening primrose.”

I suspect if I put a time lapse camera they would be pointing the opposite direction about 10:00 when the sun pops over that fence to their east, and over the course of the day they would move to track the sun.

At the interface between the little, tiny daisies and the evening primrose.

Tucked way in the back are two baby palm trees. I’m pretty certain they weren’t planted here deliberately – more likely to be the spawn of some of those huge palms across the street that you see in every astrophotography picture of the western horizon. Give it twenty or thirty years and they’ll be fifty feet tall, just like their parents. (And destroying that fence behind them.)