May Flowers

The last iris is blooming out front.  The ones in our backyard have finished their show and only show brown, translucent fists where the flowers used to be.  I do wish they had a longer season--and this year they seemed to be done blooming more quickly than in previous years.

I suspect this year I really will have to get my act together and thin, separate and fertilize the rhizomes instead of just talking about it.  I like our iris's deep purple color, and I imagine that they would be the sort of flower that appears on altars.

This year we have no California poppies in our yard, and I have to make do with the ones that grow up and down and across the street.  Several years ago, we had some growing on our back steps, and I took a time-lapse photo of them slowly opening as the sun rose in the morning sky.  

I like them because they are orange, and because they appear in the cracks in sidewalks, or alongside roads, or in alleys.  I like them because they have a long blooming season, so you can never be sure where you might suddenly come across them.

Some of last year's other poppies managed to self-seed in unexpected places--assorted pots, and a few odd corners in a planter.  They aren't blooming yet, and we don't know what color the flowers will be.  Last year they were mauve, with veins of darker purple shading upward from the flowers' bases.  

These are the more formal kind of poppies, and as I recall, the green outer sheath of leaves over the buds will split in the evening, and over the course of the night fall off.  If the blooms haven't properly popped out by the early morning, they will by mid-morning or so--dropping the sheath.   The color and the shape of the blooms last year was sublime, and put me in mind of flowers an enchanter might grow.

I also enjoy the seed pods afterward, with their secret chambers and hidden structure rattling with tiny poppy seeds

Camas grows in our part of the Willamette Valley, and I wish we could encourage it to grow in our yard.  It's all over a slope about four blocks away, and similar patches grow here and there along the waterways, or near the neighboring slough.   I like it because it's purple, and because the stem structure reminds me of cathedral spires.   Supposedly, you can roast and eat the roots--but I think they're difficult to dig out.

Larkspur, between the Autzen Stadium millrace and the Willamette River.  This photo isn't capturing the gestalt effect of the spiky purple (purple, again) flowers growing in a curtain between the grasses.

We've got some growing along the eastern side of our house, and I'm afraid it's much less striking than the splashes I saw along the jogging and dog-park paths.  It strikes me as the sort of flower a milkmaid or farm girl would gather in her apron and place in a pitcher set on the kitchen table.

Mark and I couldn't figure out what these flowers were.  He thought they might be cone flowers or echinacea.  They're cute, in a mod, 1966 kind of way.  I can see them being made into boutonnières, worn by groomsmen in a meadow wedding.