My latest favorite wild-flower, Western St. John’s Wort. This patch grows amongst the rocks by Pine Creek Lake, at about 9,300 feet elevation.
Another lapse in posts; another back-packing outing, this time for three nights, two full days of flowers, sun, water, and rock. There could hardly be a more idyllic setting than this:
Posted in Native Plants
Here’s Emerson waxing poetic about a flower in the woods. His rather old-fashioned and self-consciously poetic vein can be trying: You can tell I’m a poet because I say "thee!" And because I invert normal sentence structures! (Yes, I know that both language and poetic conventions were different in 1834, but greater poets worked with them without sounding so stilted in some lines. The problem is that those lines jar, and they do that because Emerson establishes a pretty straightforward syntax and style at the beginning. Okay, I’ll shut up now.)
Despite some stylistic lapses, the concepts here are endlessly intruiging. It’s a version of that old conundrum: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make any sound? I don’t think this is a great poem, but it came to mind during my latest philosophical meanderings about bean blossoms and the nature of beauty, so I thought I’d go ahead and post it. Also, the line I quote as my title for this post is pretty damn good: simple, unforced, yet profound — and it scans perfectly, every other syllable receiving emphasis, like the downbeat in a measure of music.
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
On being asked, Whence is the flower?
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.
Posted in Poetry
Bean Blossoms
This can’t be the sort of bloom Carol of May Dream Gardens had in mind when she started the Green Thumb Sunday flower posts, but surely she’ll let this one go, given my most excellent excuse: after my garden, flowers and vegetables all, was taken down and out by hail a couple of weeks ago, a bean blossom—precursor of a bean—is a welcome sight indeed. It helps, of course, that they have practically no competition, as the hail stripped my delphinium, decimated my echinacea, and –but enough is enough.
Posted in Metaphysical Musings, Vegetables
That’s Lava Lake, an hour’s drive from my house, and a mere three-mile hike up. I had a campsite at the base of that spit. Wonderful water, fine rocks for warming up afterwards, but no internet access.
Here’s the view from the spit itself:
I have to apologize for the quality of these photos; neither I nor my computer program can match the quality of the subject. I intend to work on both.
These are Montana huckleberries. Such profusion is rare; two or three berries per bush is far more common, so the trick is finding a big patch of bearing bushes. I collected enough for one cobbler and one jar of jam.
It’s tempting to blame it all on husband Steve’s brothers, who visited for a week and who aren’t here to defend themselves, but that would be false, since they left over a week ago. However, since they got me out hiking for the first time this summer, and our hikes that week started me on a roll, I think I will blame them after all. Or thank them, because I really didn’t think my arthritic knees, which have been officially declared a cartilage-free zone, would put up with this sort of activity, but they’re better after each hike. The overnight—actual back-packing!—was a warm-up for a four-day trip up to another stunning lake, Pine Creek, which is a tougher five-mile hike up, including some traverses through high mountain meadows full of wild flowers. I’ll bring back some photos.
Posted in Out and About
That's Lava Lake, an hour's drive from my house, and a mere three-mile hike up. I had a campsite at the base of that spit. Wonderful water, fine rocks for warming up afterwards, but no internet access.
Here's the view from the spit itself:
I have to apologize for the quality of these photos; neither I nor my computer program can match the quality of the subject. I intend to work on both.
These are Montana huckleberries. Such profusion is rare; two or three berries per bush is far more common, so the trick is finding a big patch of bearing bushes. I collected enough for one cobbler and one jar of jam.
It's tempting to blame it all on husband Steve's brothers, who visited for a week and who aren't here to defend themselves, but that would be false, since they left over a week ago. However, since they got me out hiking for the first time this summer, and our hikes that week started me on a roll, I think I will blame them after all. Or thank them, because I really didn't think my arthritic knees, which have been officially declared a cartilage-free zone, would put up with this sort of activity, but they're better after each hike. The overnight—actual back-packing!—was a warm-up for a four-day trip up to another stunning lake, Pine Creek, which is a tougher five-mile hike up, including some traverses through high mountain meadows full of wild flowers. I'll bring back some photos.
Posted in Out and About
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