Presenting to you even more flowers enjoying the sunshine. They were being visited by lots of bees, butterflies, and dragonflies. And other pollinators we didn’t notice, no doubt. We did have a south wind, a breeze actually, which made some of the flowers almost as difficult to photograph as the ever-in-motion birds.
‘Tennessee White’ dwarf crested iris
yellow trillium
foamflower
‘white lady banks’ rose
♡
South winds jostle them — Bumblebees come — Hover — hesitate — Drink, and are gone —
Butterflies pause On their passage Cashmere — I — softly plucking, Present them here!
~ Emily Dickinson (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #98)
♡
‘white lady banks’ rose
Japanese jack-in-the-pulpit
fern-leaf scorpion-weed
bluets
atamasco lily aka rain lily
highbush blueberry
Unlike Emily, I didn’t pluck any of the flowers, but have presented them to you by way of photographs instead. There is always something new (to me) growing at the botanical garden, and it’s also fun seeing the familiar plants and noticing how they keep changing with the circle of the seasons.
3.30.24 ~ ‘old blush’ rose North Carolina Botanical Garden
It’s always a pleasure to be greeted by the roses dangling from their arbor each time we visit the botanical garden. It never gets old! Like sunrises and sunsets, I suppose. A steady presence. But we were on a new mission this day to locate a Virginia dwarf trillium, another tiny ephemeral we heard was blooming. Along the way we saw…
Spanish lavender
hermit thrush
This (below) was the only undamaged dwarf trillium we could find, surrounded by other kinds of plants. We had torrential rains for a couple of days and I think they did a number on the tiny trilliums. But I’m grateful we got a chance to see this one. It is much smaller than all the other regular size trilliums we’ve been seeing this spring.
Virginia dwarf trillium
spreading Jacob’s ladder
white-throated sparrow
Only by living for many moons in one region, my peripheral senses tracking seasonal changes in the local plants while the scents of the soil steadily seep in through my pores — only over time can the intelligence of a place lay claim upon my person. Slowly, as the seasonal round repeats itself again and again, the lilt and melody of the local songbirds becomes an expectation within my ears, and so the mind I’ve carried within me settles into the wider mind that enfolds me. ~ David Abram (Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology)
yellow trillium
twisted trillium
pine warbler
sweet shrub aka Carolina allspice
great white trillium (?)
tufted titmouse
red chokeberry
squirrel going out on a limb to reach maple seeds what a mess he made discarding the “helicopters”
carpenter bee (thanks to Eliza for the identification)
As we were making our way back to the parking lot this giant bee (above) was hovering over the walkway, blocking our path. Well, if it was just going to stay there I might as well get a picture of it. I don’t know if these creatures are unique to this area but sometimes they hover outside our windows and crash into them repeatedly. It sounds like someone is throwing pebbles at the window.
So we’ve lived here for ten moons I think, not very many so far, but our senses are slowly getting familiar with the seasonal changes.
