How did all this information get tucked away at the end of an ordinary stem? One lonely bloom, or group of blooms, on the way to the hospital. If I watched my phone and my watch along the way, as most of those I pass, instead of the things on the way, I might have missed this. Orange (or peach?) and red with stripes and all sorts of things well beyond my imagination. Flowers are so complicated that I think we only pretend to understand them. They become… I think… just flowers.
I wrote yesterday's post some time ago and filed it away in To Be Posted. It seems like at one point I saw everything for the first time, before things ceased to exist or before they became so plentiful that they almost ceased to exist. This flower turned out to be almost as common as poppies. Difficult to see because they are everywhere. Striking blooms by the thousands from ordinary succulents. When the flowers are gone, the plants become almost nothing. So I thought I should squeeze this post in. There was precisely one flower in the beginning. I found another near my bedroom window. Now there are fields of them. And it's hard to remember how spectacular the first one was. Like a first kiss, a first love, a first taking of breath. We look around and they are everywhere, but the first was the first and continues to be the first as long as we remember.
This is a new flower for me. I haven’t seen one on my normal walk, but this was one block over so I could stop at the Post Office and then continue uphill. One of my homeless friends told me there was a book sale at the Achievement House Store. Achievement House is an organization that helps people with special needs. I don’t go there very often because it’s mostly a junk store, what I call a junk store anyway, with books and clothes and lots of junk. I try very hard to avoid accumulating junk. But books…
The sale was 4 for $1.00. My friend had already laid some things in a special pile for me to find. One of them was a treasure. It was an Astronomy textbook from 1964, the year I took Astronomy with very limited comprehension as a Freshman in college. It has none of the color or colorized Hubble photographs that are so distracting. It has line drawings, black and white photographs and text. What I could barely understand 54 years ago, now seems obvious. I suppose I’ve gone on learning what baffled me, or else I just inadvertently absorbed it. No one in my family knew anything about what I studied, though they were highly educated. So I couldn’t come home and talk Astronomy at the dinner table, or almost anything else having to do with college. I was expected to do well and not to bother them with it. So I now have a place on my reading table for my latest treasure.
It was interesting that the sale was 4 for $1.00. I only wanted the one book, and I had a bus to catch, so it should have been $1.00 with three more books if I wanted them. But the man at the counter, who was probably working near his limits, called out to me and made me walk back to the counter. He handed me thee quarters because I only wanted the one book. I looked at him for a second and then decided to say, “Thank you.”
Now I’ll have to go back more often. On the bright side, there are wonderful flowers only a block off my normal walk. This one, I hope, is just the beginning.
This flower, or should I say these flowers — I’m baffled by what I see — seem to be going in four different directions. Are they simply competing for space, or is this their design? If it’s one flower from a single stem, how marvelously complex. If it’s meant to confuse, I’m confused. If it’s meant to surprise, I’m surprised. The longer I look, the less I understand. How amazingly beautiful.
It would be nice if I could just blow the flags out perfectly. The wind came and went and the light was beginning to fail. Close enough. An American flag for Memorial Day, and though you can’t make out what it is, a red Marine Corps flag to give it context. This is the same house that provided Christmas and Springtime front gates, and will soon provide Summertime. It is also the house over which I took In the Sky Without Me, a stupendous cloud floating by itself in the sky as I walked home. At least I found it stupendous. They are wonderful people who have been here less than a year, but are putting their minds to figuring out the weather, which is unique, and the community itself. They have two dogs and take them on long exploratry walks. A few weeks ago I was eating a tostada at Taco de Mexico, something I don’t usually do. I was feeling very quiet and anonimous. Suddenly someone pounded on the window. The customers looked and then looked away. I knew exactly who it was even with the sun directly in my eyes — the only two people I know who would pound on a window to say hello. This is, after all, their community now. Happy Memorial Day.
I’ve gone through the blog a few times and have detect a trend which is accidental, I think. The trend is beautiful weeks of bright, happy flowers and less beautiful weeks. Positive and not so positive weeks. I post the pictures more or less in the order they are produced, but leave spaces to fill in with other, newer posts. So, chronological order is hit or miss. But life isn’t all happy, beautiful. Sometimes it requires squinting to see the truth. And sometimes the truth isn’t beautiful, just true. And every so often, a bunch of those get packed together, and it seems I’ve grown negative.
I’ve skipped taking pictures of damaged poppies. They don’t last forever, and sometimes the wind blows their petals off. Sometimes they grow out onto sidewalks and get crushed. And sometimes they get old and die. I suppose I don’t find that very interesting. But in-between budding and these extremes, and especially at this time of year, poppies are everywhere. They tell the same story over and over again, at least stories of the same sort.
Here the story seems to be weeds with an orange accent, or weeds taking over.
And here the story would seem to be “Goodnight sweet prince,” or princess. Sleep tight. I wonder if that expression comes from flowers closed up tight for the night?
Last week I wrote something about a plant So ugly that… I felt obligated to check in with it each time I passed. Last night something seemed wrong. There was more of it, and it certainly did not grow over night.
Then I remembered a conversation about another healthier plant in the back yard, one I hadn’t seen, that was going great guns. But when I got home I remembered their plans to build a second story on the small house. It’s a cute house, but with a wife and baby, both of them equally cute, it had grown small.
So then it came to me. They are moving things out front to save them from future workmen. The back yard will have people trudging around and things piled high. The front yard will be a don’t touch area. So there it is. Two versions of the same ugly plant in a single harmonious planting. It makes me feel warm inside to see how much some people care.
A forced visit to the laundromat convinced me that there must be a better solution to clothing and cleanliness than washing machines and quarter fed driers. Having your mother or a girlfriend do the laundry works for me, though I have neither. But it's a problem I don’t feel obliged to solve when I have clean laundry in the drawer. When I'm elbow deep in a solution of detergent and bleach to move things around and even out a load, however, I think of the vast amounts of chemicalized water and all the energy, both human and electrical, involved in cleanliness. Tolstoy had an aunt, if I remember correctly, who never bathed. She abstained on religious grounds, though I never quite understood what that meant. The Hawaiians, who swam in the ocean both for sport and cleanliness, treated clothing more as decoration than concealment. Something we might consider. They pounded a soft paperlike cloth from bark — there was no woven cloth — and treated the finished product with reverence. They did not wash or dry clean what they wore. They returned what was no longer serviceable to the earth which had provided it, and made do with leaves and flowers in between. It’s a lovely picture, and except for the pounding it seems like an easy solution. Of course, it might depend on where you find yourself. What, for example, would you do on cold nights in front of the computer? For the record, it’s pleasant outside tonight. I’m wearing an old t-shirt and boxer shorts as I type this, which seems like the perfect outfit under the circumstances, except that I’m running low on boxer shorts.
Maybe there should be a whole site devoted to poppies. I find myself skipping over them because I’ve taken so many pictures of poppies already. Here is one reaching up through a maze of weeds. Just catching the light. I see poppies on almost every walk. Four or five months ago I saw someone digging up the poppies in his front yard along the fence. I was horrified. He said not to worry and showed me his method. He had purchased plants at the nursery for the space along the fence, but he wasn’t going to fill the space. He left lots of room. He dug up the old poppies, knocked the seeds out on the sidewalk, swept them into a pan, and sprinkled them in the spaces. “They’ll be back,” he said. He also sprinkled seeds into a long window planter, and the planter is now overflowing with poppies. In short, he managed the poppies in his yard, and the yard is as beautiful as a casual garden could be.
My neighbor, who helped plant the patio, bills himself as a Master Gardener, a title he achieved while working at a nursery many years ago. He has a very selective range of appreciation based on something I haven’t quite figured out yet. He’s very good at some things, but not good at others. He pulled a weed eater out of his van about six months ago and cleared all the weeds that were growing on the front side of the building. About half of those weeds were poppies. But they were weeds. They weren’t beautiful, fortuitous weeds, just weeds. I came home and they were all gone. But in six months they have all returned. There may even be more. They are pernicious weeds that people around here give all the freedom they require. And the weeds return that favor with dense patches of beautiful blooms.I find it very difficult to see a poppy like the one above and not stop to admire it.
This, I believe, is related to something I posted on the 17th of this month in A Nexus of Good Intentions. But I can’t be certain if the thing pictured here is a before or an after. I’ve come to both conclusions. Of course, it may just be something completely different. There’s a gulf between saying you like something, and saying something meaningful about what you like. I feel like a mother saying to an infant, “Look, fire engine.” And the baby says, in its own way, “Yes, I hear you.” Of course this kind of communication goes on all day. And not just with babies. We point things out and expect the pointing to be meaningful. I’m giving you this opportunity to see what I saw, but is that a meaningful communication or just the sharing of an emptiness? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. But that’s all I have. I was struck by this thing, whatever it is. I find it interesting. Perhaps you will find it equally interesting. Then we can each claim to have communicated.
This is what ornamental cabbage looks like when it goes to seed. It’s mixed with onions, sweet peas and nasturtiums. It’s really beautiful from a distance. Up close it’s a mess. It’s not supposed to be grown in hot soil. It was ornamental for a few weeks and then, like a hungry teenager, it grew into a monster. It was supposed to stay small and cute. Our landlady, from China, has asked for enough seeds to grow these in her own garden. She likes it growing out of control. When we give her an envelope of seed, we’ll have to tell her how to amend the soil. The sweet peas are perhaps 40% too high. They have grown well beyond the large structure I built for them and strung with two balls of twine. There is a mad flowering taking place well above the structure and above where we can reach. A rainbow of sweet smelling flowers on long stems. Next year I suspect they will grow more like they are suppose to, unless my neighbor can’t help amending the soil again. I think he finds that fun. I find there’s no use explaining things to him. He figures out what he’s doing as he does it. I suspect his parents gave up trying to explain neatness and putting things away. But at least the plants are growing. In fact, they are growing with abandon.
These are from the ramshackle garden at St. Timothy’s. To me they have all the qualities of martian immigrants. A kind of science fiction flower. They are enormously dramatic and I’m almost expecting them to threaten the existence of humanity. Do they become the people who admire them? Do they inject microbes into the blood stream? Do they mesmerize and control? I’ve never seen a flower quite like this before. Its colors are tremendous, and obviously alien. They sit in a garden filled with many things that started out life in different parts of our tiny globe, or possibly different parts of our tiny orbit. I attended mass at St. Timothy’s not long ago. I wanted to experience what my Catholic friend experience. I’ve heard the mass in English twice — once when my older son became a Catholic. I heard it in French when I was married. The rest of the time I heard it in Latin at the Norbertine Abbey when I lived in Orange County. But hearing it in words I fully understood, I was somewhat lost. I was all set to say “pax vobiscum” at just the right moment, but they don’t say that in English. I’m not even sure they say “peace be with you.” I sort of smiled and mumbled. But I got to thinking that maybe this plant isn’t martian at all. It may just be English slowly invading the Church while no one pays attention. Maybe that’s the plot. In the end the priest stands up and speaks English and everyone solemnly says, “Amen.” And the camera pans to an audience with reddish and golden eyes. And…
Only the most meticulous front yards have no poppies. Everyone else, I believe, thinks of them as a blessing. Here is one peeking out under a hedge.
And here are some squeezing between the sidewalk and an aging fence.
And here are some infiltrating a garden of succulents, geraniums and other things. There are so many poppies at the moment that they have become, is it possible, almost invisible. The poppies that were bright orange foreground are becoming more and more background, an accent to the fullness of life one comes to expect. Except that their days are numbered, as are ours. And the day will come, as it always has, when they are nothing but seed awaiting the miracle of regeneration. And we must search for other things while waiting for them to return and once again surprise us.
At one time there was a pot with some succulents in it. Now the pot is — I love this word — subsumed. It serves no further purpose. Only part of its edge or lip is visible. You can see by the stems that this did not happen over night. The person or tenant who planted this vase may have come and gone, lived and died, but the process continues. Things tangle. Things crowd. But as long as the space isn’t empty, no one bothers with it. It becomes — a word I’ve used many times here — a texture. Infinitely busy, infinitely repetitive.
I’ve wondered what to say about this for a long time. It’s so ugly that I stop to visit it almost every walk. It reminds me of what my stomach must look like turned inside out. Or maybe the inside of my lungs. It seems like a genetic experiment where the numbers got mixed up. But then I remember that pugs, which are delightful pets, look almost as ugly. In fact, they are prized for their absence of beauty. The owner of this plant says I should see the one in the back yard. It’s many times bigger. He loves it like a pug and visits it every time he waters. “This one’s doing well,” he says. “Yes,” I reply, not knowing exactly how to interpret “well”. It seems like something only a mother could love, and yet here I am almost every walk checking to make sure it’s doing well. Despite not wanting to, I seem to understand completely.
It’s one thing to be amazed by the beauty of a flower, but quite another to stand before something like this and wonder. Obviously it’s a bloom, but how does it work? Or is it a thousand blooms all in one? I was stunned. I’m still a bit stunned. It’s from the garden on the side of St. Timothy’s Catholic Church. A ramshackle garden, built, I suspect, on the enthusiastic response of congregants. It is the nexus of good intentions, but its plan seems to go in all directions. It contains a bit here and there of everyone’s best intentions, everyone’s favorite things. It’s a hodgepodge where one can go and be surprised over and over again, but not terribly well maintained. Or maybe it’s perfectly maintained. How, exactly, does one properly maintain a hodgepodge? Or differently put, how does one maintain a congregation? Congregations aren’t armies of uniformed participants. Its members don’t think alike, act alike, but they nonetheless cohere. I, of course, want everything to be perfectly laid out and perfectly maintained. But is that what the garden wants? I think the garden is quite happy as it is.
It’s hard to tell which is more striking. The petals are too many and the center is too large. Together they look like a stylized constellation. It reminds me of the the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades (star cluster M45). In Greek mythology the seven sisters are Maia, Electra, Alcyone, Taygete, Asterope, Celaeno and Merope. Only six of the stars are easily visible to the naked eye, leading to the myth of the missing sister. Which sister is missing depends on which story you read. Rather than sisters, it might refer to the six stars of the Subaru logo with the seventh (the missing) star visible. Subaru is the Japanese term for Pleiades. But for the logo the stars unite the various arms of the company into a unified whole. Subaru or the Pleiades is a tiny cluster to the right of Orion, the most prominent constellation in the night sky. Whether flowers or stars, perhaps they are both the same.
I suppose a botanist could look at these flowers and say they need more water, or there isn’t enough phosphorus in the soil. They seem a bit worse for wear. Or possibly the botanist would merely say they’re a bit old and about to wither and die. It’s hard to tell what’s what when you stumble upon things. So they may be struggling to exist or they may have already existed and are now just in their declining phase. But if you’ll look very carefully at the pixelated blur just above the intense yellow portion of the left flower, you’ll see a greenish colored bug — at least I saw a greenish colored bug — climbing down to the sex organs of the flower. You can also doubleclick the picture. The bug was wide eyed and mesmerized. So, whatever stage these flowers are at, they are currently doing their job. Maybe their rundown appearance just makes them easier for the bugs to see and relate to. I felt sorry for them until I saw the bug. And then I thought clever, very clever. This flower doesn’t care what I think. It cares what bugs think.
A myriad of tiny flowers that makes this bush look blue at a distance. This is just beneath my bedroom window. I look beyond it to see what’s going on in the world. There is so much of it, and the leaves and flowers so small that the camera has trouble focusing. I’m told that the new camera on my next iPhone will be a big step forward. The camera on this phone I’ve used only for a small percentage of its usable life, thinking that cell phone cameras were just for selfies. I don’t think that in the hundreds of photos I’ve taken in the past few months there is a single selfie, which is just as well. I am no contest for flowers. My old face and sluggish features are adequate for going from flower to flower, but not as a subject in themselves. When I raise the angle of my view I see Morro Rock and waves crashing on the breakwater. On a clear day, which is unusual, I see blue sky seeping into infinity. And here and there I see flowers I should get close to and photograph. But first these marvelous blue ones on a bush with minuscule leaves.
This is a picture taken from Google Maps of a place where I spent summers when I was four and five. It’s just down river from Parker Dam on the California side of the Colorado River. The dam forms Lake Havasu, which is now a recreational vacation destination. The streets are gated and almost everything is gone. Only traces of houses and mature trees remain. I have no idea when this occurred or why exactly. My grandfather worked in some capacity at the dam and lived in what I believe was government housing. It was a long drive through the desert to anywhere populated, so the government had to provide housing, though I don’t remember any discussions of it. What I do very clearly remember is the pile of rocks above California St. that formed the back yard where my cousin Herlene and I — I don’t think people name girls Herlene anymore — climbed and explored hour upon hour. Herlene was older than I was by two or three years and a fearless climber. Oddly enough, I don’t remember being supervised. There was a bell or something that told us to come back to the house. It rang for meals and bath time. I wore a pair of shorts with no shirt and no shoes all summer and besides feeling absolutely free was as brown as a roasted coffee bean.
There was a small post office or postal substation with mail boxes in the direction of the dam. My grandmother would give us salt tablets, believed to help us with the heat, and sometimes send us off to get the mail. It seemed like a much longer walk at that age than it would today. Herlene carried a small piece of paper with the combination to the mail box on it. She knew how to read somewhat. I showed no aptitude for reading until very much later, something that caused my parents no end of concern. Anyway, it made her feel very important and obviously superior. We sometimes visited other houses on the way, about which I knew absolutely nothing. I simply soaked in the decorating, drank lemonade and from the porch considered the yard and the lay of the land. I remember finding it all very uninteresting.
What I call the post office sat by itself with nothing around it. On the left was a door leading to the mail boxes. There was a short wall of them on the left and another on the right. My grandparents' box was midway down the left.
I have now given you enough background to give this story some perspective. On a particular trip to the post office Herlene, who wasn’t nearly as superior as she pretended to be, had trouble opening the box. She fumbled over left, right, pass the number, and so forth. She tried one way after another. In the process I turned my back and looked at the opposite wall of mail boxes. I looked down the left and down the right until I spotted a box that seemed familiar. I walked over to it, reached up and spun the dial right, stop, left, stop, right, stop, and then snapped the knob and opened the door. Herlene had turned to see what I was doing and went ballistic when the door opened. She grabbed me and drug me out of the post office because… Because we weren’t supposed to do that to other peoples' mail boxes. Something like that. I didn’t play with the box and stumble on the combination. I turned the dial like I had done it a million times before and it popped open with absolute confidence. The box was empty. And that’s all the story I have because I was never allowed in the post office again.
I remember this story from time to time as the first example in my life of the conflict between spiritualism and materialism. I don’t have an exact explanation for what happened, but I do know that my knowledge, because it was that, was not the result of a material involvement, and it was not the result of chance or coincidence. I learned at age four or five that acting on such impulses was much better, or rather much safer to do in private.
In January I wrote something about my mother in 1932 Underwood Upright. She did very strange things all her life. She went to UCLA at fourteen but dropped out because of scarlet fever. She saw things that couldn’t be seen, heard things that couldn’t be heard and grew crazier with the passing of every year. She dismissed the importance of her strange abilities, thinking of herself as being absolutely normal. She, of course, was anything but normal. If I told her about the things I experienced, she would reject those too. When I share them with others they tend to become tense and dismissive. So, on this Mother's Day, I share a little story about mail boxes in a place that no longer exists, as a kind of easy introduction.
This flower was a bit off the beaten path. I found it on a walk to the Vets Center one Monday evening. It was against a fence on the side of a driveway. The discolorations, I think, are from car exhaust, or car exhaust and dirt from the roadway. There was exactly one bloom against this fence. There was no pick and choose involved. I walked back, snapped the shot, and left. Flowers don’t decide to get dressed up or comb their hair based on who’s invited or who might be there. They give 100% every time. They dress to the nines even if no one’s there. And they shine through dirt and grime as if that was specifically what they were designed for. I had dressed down for dinner. The flower had dressed up for it's short eternity.
I’m guessing that the white in this plant is a weakness. That something blocks it from becoming uniformly green and makes its weakness a strength. It’s a striking plant, even at a distance. It has a grandeur about it, a purposefulness, though it’s rather small. I can almost hear the voice asking, “Would you like plain or striped.” Why on earth would I want plain?
A recurrent theme on this blog has been poppies. It’s a beautiful flower, but also not very particular as to where it grows, and almost certain to make a comeback no matter how you mow it down or pull it up. There will be many more poppy pictures in the coming months. This one, however, is special. This is a yellow poppy.
The California poppy, the so-called golden poppy, is indigenous to California, and is orange. I wrote about driving north with my family as a boy through endless fields of poppies in a post titled Golden and how magical it seemed. But this is not a California poppy, though it looks almost identical, it’s something someone bought at a nursery or bought seeds for and planted near the back corner of the library. I’m sure it’s color was much more noticeable in person. It really stunned me when I saw it.
Poppies, it turns out come in a variety of colors: red, white, blue, black and red, red with a fringe of white, a beautiful purple with an elaborate center, which is the source of heroin, as well as yellow and orange. I suspect there are many more varieties, but you would have to travel around the world to see them, or make a few more clicks on the internet. Orange is enough for me, but I can also imagine infinite fields of yellow. I wonder if yellow poppies will start showing up in sidewalk cracks and in yards downwind of the library.
A flower so lusciously large and bright that when the texture of the petals is clear, the stigma is out of focus. I complimented a man in a parking lot a few years ago on his obviously brand new Harley Davidson. He was beaming with pride and it was as big and as manly as he was. But there was something bright and gentle about the bike. I asked him what color it was, expecting something like lonesome sun or dessert evening sand. He looked at me and smiled. He asked if I knew what a color wheel was. I said, of course. “Well, this bike isn’t sort of or some kind of, this bike is dead center yellow. There must be a thousand yellows, but this is where they start.” I think this flower has the same quality about it. It’s large and manly, in a feminine sort of way, but above all else it’s yellow. Only an idiot would ask what color it was. The one bloom on a large bush, and I couldn’t move until I snapped this photograph. With a little leather and a great deal of chrome I suspect we could almost hear its engine.
This is a very interesting pot on a side street in San Luis Obispo. After dialysis I got something to eat and walked to the bus by a less traveled route. I suppose Robert Frost would say that that made all the difference. But in truth, it did perk me up a bit. Someone cared enough to make an artistic arrangement of cactus and succulents surrounded by lava rock. Just enough of each. I tend to walk that way now just to check in with the plants. I’m not sure they recognize me, but I recognize them. They are more beautiful each time I look.
This is the answer to something I wondered about last week in Winner of the Biggest Bloom Contest. This is what the tall spikes look like when they bloom. What still isn’t answered is whether the full bloom will kill the plant and, of course, why anything so grand was necessary in the first place. This isn’t a question that Nature tends to ask. I suppose under the right conditions there could be entire valleys or stretches of coast line filled with such plants. In which case we might not wonder why such grandeur was necessary. The answer would be obvious. In another month the entire spike should be in bloom, and sometime after that we will have the answer to the second question. Will the bloom kill the plant? Some plants are like salmon swimming upstream. They procreate and then they die, but in the process they produce enormous quantities of offspring. While others procreate grandly and go right on living. Which will it be?
This is one of the perfect succulents mentioned the other day in Explosive. It is hanging over a planter just off the sidewalk. The rain has stopped, leaving everything clean and beautiful.
My theory on why there are so many perfect succulents in Morro Bay. It’s only a theory, but I suspect it’s true. Two reasons. The first is climate. Except for the cold weather we’re having at the moment, the climate is mild. It’s been cold lately, but our huge population of homeless people are simply bundling up a bit more. It drops into the 40s, which is cold for me, but it never seems to drop down into freezing, thanks to the ocean’s moderating influence. So, no one is complaining, they are just putting up with it. Also, the ocean air is moist, which I think succulents like. Second, and this is a bit more controversial, is the mix of adults and seniors, and the rarity of children. The children who do live in Morro Bay seem abnormally polite and well mannered. They haven’t had the opportunity to band into groups of marauding teens, or to play on their own until their parents come home. With a different mix of young people the plants would be subject to sword fights, petty larceny and trampling. But none of the young people here seems to have thought that plants deserve such treatment. A broken flower suggests that a dog has been searching for something, though even the dogs around here seem polite and well behaved.
At least, that’s my theory. Personally, I would trade a great many succulents for a few more children. We could use some excited screams and high pitched laughter before dinner. We could find out what’s really going on if we had more children to explain things to us.
This, I think, is a variety of Oxalis. It’s an all too common weed in these parts, but one people do very little to get rid of. It seems to light up the neighborhood when it blooms. Under Oxalis pes-caprae, Wikipedia offers the following common names: Bermuda buttercup, African wood-sorrel, Bermuda sorrel, buttercup oxalis, Cape sorrel, English weed, goat's-foot, sourgrass, soursob, and soursop, along with some less common ones. It’s an ingredient in South African water flower stew. Wikipedia also offers the following under Control:
The plant has a reputation for being very difficult to eliminate once it has spread over an area of land. The weed propagates largely through its underground bulbs and this is one reason why it is so difficult to eradicate, as pulling up the stems leaves the bulbs behind. Soil in which the plant has grown is generally contaminated with many small bulbs.
So it may be that people have just learned to give up and let it bloom. But with poppies and alyssum and buttercup oxalis all blooming at once, there isn’t a single yard that doesn’t look ready for summer. Remember, we’re not growing crops this time of year, we’re growing happiness for as long as it lasts.
There is something different to be seen on every walk. This appeared since my last trip to the barber shop, on a way I travel only to get haircuts, in a garden filled with succulents, each more perfect than the next. This, of course, is not a succulent. It amazes me that I seem to recognize its parts, or most of them, but not their disposition. It’s like an explosive new year toy with all the insides exploding outward in celebration. Except that when I took this picture it was early spring. It’s attached to a plant with long thin leaves possessing many blooms. There was nothing about the plant last haircut to suggest that this might happen. I felt completely justified in ignoring it. But now, how will I ever be able to do that again?
There is just no end to the surprises that greet me as I pass the former Yoga Center garden. This is a succulent bloom that is just starting to flower. Delicate green and yellow. Things happening in all directions. I tell myself I’m just going to walk past it, but then my eye catches something that wasn’t there yesterday, and won’t be the same tomorrow. What's left of the garden is a mess of things crowded together, but a delightful mess. There’s an inner garden behind a gate that I haven’t braved, with a strong fence now installed. Through spaces in the fence I see bright splotches of color and wonder.
There are three of these in the flower bed off the parking lot, and another in front of the Morro Bay Visitor Center. I could only squeeze two into the picture. They are so big and prominent that people seem actually to miss them. They’re a bit like the trees people don’t see. In the background is the Recreation Hall of St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, though I’m not sure they call it that, and just a piece of the church’s roof top in the distance. A huge number of people drive past here on their way to Albertsons. I think they are more concerned about traffic than plants, or what they are trying not to forget that they need at the market. I have that problem too. I’m not sure if this is just the stem and it’s going to flower, or if this is it. I also wonder if it’s like the yucca, where after the bloom goes up the plant itself dies. I certainly hope not. If you’d like to guess, feel free. I’ll update with future posts. I should also add that though the blooms must have been growing for some time, and I walk past here on a regular basis, I never once noticed them until today.