Taken for Granted

It looked like a festival: Black swallowtails in the ironweed! Five or six elegant Papilio polyxenes  flying around, alighting, three or four on the same flower head, raising and lowering their blue-tinged wings. I ran for my camera. Of the 60 photos I took, none captured the spirit. Determined to get a photo of not just one butterfly but a bunch, I marched back to the meadow and clicked and tweaked and refocused as butterflies flew out of the frame as if teasing me, or vanished, or landed on other plants. Darn! Well, I was just going to stand there until I got my picture! I wanted that picture!

And then God said to me, "You will get that picture when I grant it."

Oh, I said, and relaxed. And took 219 pictures. Here is the one I think does it.

I guess I will get what I want when God grants it.

Blue Sage

Blue Sage, salvia azurea, belongs to the mint family and also, says the wonderful Ozark Wildflowers manual by Don Kurz, belongs to the western third of the Ozarks, but this is the eastern third and I am so glad it's here, in a meadow that had a path mown into it that allowed convenient closeness for a photo. Wild Blue Sage's hooded flowers -- like the flowers of the "tame" garden sage -- are loved by bumblebees.

Wildflower Week: May 12

Red clover has tough, sour leaves, but a tender flower about the size of a gumball. Very common flower, until you give it a good look and see it is aflame with life. Latin name: Trifolium pratense. I hope you have enjoyed the springtime wildflower walk.

Wildflower Week: May 11

For a long time I thought this spectacular floral firework was a "passion flower," but it's a Horsemint. Blooms briefly, dries out quickly. I love the purple freckles. In the same family is a quite similar flower, better known, called Bee Balm. Latin name of this one: Monarda bradburiana. Unforgettable.

Wildflower Week: May 10

Have you ever seen a more open and innocent face? Miss May 10 might be a buttercup except it's too early in the year for buttercups, and it doesn't form a cup. In fact, it is a Common Cinquefoil, Latin Potentilla simplex. It was positively identified as such via the sawtoothed leaves.

Wildflower Week: May 9

The five-petaled stars of Phlox. Common. Taken for granted. (Never take anything so beautiful for granted.) Lots of domesticated versions of phlox, but here it is wild and untamed. Like litmus paper, it's pinkish or purplish depending on the acidity or alkalinity of the local soil.

Wildflower Week, May 8

Too early for roses? Not in rural Missouri. For a Sunday in May, the beautiful little Dwarf Wild Rose, Rosa multiflora.

Wildflower Week, May 7

One of the first wildflowers I remember -- I thought it was a daisy -- and it took me hours to pull out the tiny threadlike petals saying "He loves me, he loves me not...." It's a Daisy Fleabane plus a bud. Botanical name Erigeron strinosis, which sounds like something my mother said you should excuse yourself from the table for.

Wildflower Week, May 6

Spectacular beauty, eye-catching in the road shoulder: Wild columbine, or Aquilegia
canandensis. You can buy a domesticated version of this for your garden -- or you can live in rural Missouri. Check back tomorrow: There's a new wildflower each day until the 12th.

Wildflower Week, May 5

It's phlox. But it's different. The petals are lobed, not separate and defined. That's because it's creeping phlox, Phlox subulata. I love the blue flowers.

Wildflower Week

Took the camera on today's walk, the usual walk, except it's glorious May, and declared, "I will take photos of every wildflower I see today." So here they are: 9 of them. One appearing each day. Learned something as I identified them all. First, this is the Four-Leaf Milkweed, Aesclepius quadrifolia.

How Life Gets Around

I love thinking that the tiniest corners of the world vibrate with life, whether we see it or care or not, or get a photo, or laugh, or sigh at how much this looks like a loving and familiar kiss. And in August, with summer in its highest gear, everything not only vibrates, it hums.

Something Blue

I favor blue flowers, and today I saw this, for the first time, over by the bluebird box, and looked it up. It's a Wild Hyacinth (Camassia scilloides -- there's a mouthful). "Common," says the handbook, Ozark Wildflowers, "in dolomite glades, open rocky slopes, open woodlands, and prairies, found throughout the Ozarks." That's a perfect description of the land I and my neighbors live on; it has all those faces. The handbook also said Indians ate this, but that it's better not to.

Wild Petunia & Friend

The poet James Russell Lowell -- "What is so rare as a day in June?" went on to write in the same celebratory poem, "There is no blade of grass too mean/to be some happy creature's palace" -- and today I found a grasshopper enthroned in a Hairy Wild Petunia (Ruellia humilis), common Ozark wildflower. Photograph taken very early this dewy morning.

My First Daisies

Daisies are often a child's first wildflower. I read about them long before seeing any. Grew up next to a tannery that had its own railroad spur, and in the disturbed ground, just outside of our wire fence -- that coathanger-type-wire, looped and painted white -- I saw and felt these, picked their heads off, tore the hearts apart to see what was inside. They left a strong, not unpleasant scent on my fingers. Thought they were daisies. Wasn't more than five or six, but I knew that you were supposed to pick the petals off saying "He loves me, he loves me not."

Forty years later I find out this stuff is unromantically called "fleabane." And "common fleabane" at that. Can't find anybody who's sure whether these are the bane of fleas.

Today, as you can see, I have them rioting around my mailbox. Petals can be pink or white. More than 100 petals per flower. When I want to know if he loves me or not, I'll pick up the phone and ask.