Have you ever seen anything more vigorously uplifting? This is from a garden busy with flowering plants and succulents. It has precisely one of these. It was so pointy and erect that I couldn’t resist taking this picture. I have no idea what it is or why there is only one of them. But maybe the owner of the property saw something on a plastic tag at the nursery. Or maybe it was just an accident. I've found many examples of things blown uphill on an ocean breeze. It’s a mistake to suppose that everything is purposeful. And yet, perhaps even accidental things fulfill a purpose. This plant absolutely makes the garden. I’m willing to say, therefore, that perhaps that was its purpose.

Flowers quite often push the plant they bloom on into the background. Sometimes, however, they are so lush and so complicated they appear to have a life of their own. How could this bloom be the product of a pedestrian plant? It’s as if an alien life form were hovering over an earthy succulent. All this to produce a few more succulents. It is, I think, unlikely. It's so amazing that it’s hard to fathom, or maybe it’s just hard to believe. There is nothing special about this location, it's just on the ground outside a house, but what more could it require besides itself?

Cami called excitedly across the street waving me over. There was something she wanted to show me. “Are praying mantises insects?” she asked. One had landed on the tail of her flying pig. You met the pig on Happy First Day of Summer, and met Cami a few days ago when she yelled, or almost yelled, “Did you see the naked ladies?” (Everything in Its Season) But today it was a giant insect. “When it landed it was greenish.”

Yesterday it was With Bugs. Today it’s a bug that makes large flowers look small. I looked them up on Wikipedia a few minutes ago and am now trying very hard to forget everything I learned. It’s easier to say, “How cute,” than to know the truth. Insects ways and human ways are decidedly different. Flowers are completely different. It’s almost bedtime, so I think I’ll just end with that.

But I suppose it is exciting to find something that looks like a piece of wood on your pig’s curled tail and realize it’s alive. I found it just as exciting. Though if it hasn’t moved by tomorrow I may have to revise that.

A category of flowers I’ve considered is flowers with insects. Normally we associate bees with flowers. But it’s hard to get bees to sit still for a picture of them feeding and fertilizing. As soon as you’ve framed the picture they’re somewhere else. They're busy, as the saying goes. But bees aren’t the only insects. In fact, sometimes the insects are so small that I discover them only when I’m cropping the final photograph. The flowers in these photographs are both white, but they also have tiny insects, one brown and one green, small enough to go unnoticed.

White, of course, is a beautiful color for flowers. I have a bunch of white alstroemeria on my desk as I type this. I buy what they have, but I’m always pleased to find a fresh bunch of white when the time comes. Of course, alstroemeria only have a background of white with complicated adornments. These flowers are white through and through. Except for the bugs, which add the perfect compliment.

There’s more to life than flowers, though flowers are absolutely wonderful. There are also leaves, the things that support both the plant and its flowers. Sometimes their perfection is stunning.

My grandparents, my father’s parents, had a large avocado tree in their back yard. It was almost two stories high and it’s branches and leaves curved over to the ground. As a boy I could sneak into the tree and out of sight. It was a strange place to be, because it was essentially hollow. There was a trunk and branches inside, but on the outside was a thin layer of thick leaves. They made the tree look enormous, but it was only an illusion. In actuality there was almost nothing there.

I could climb up the branches in the shade and in absolute privacy. If my grandmother knew what I was doing, I’m sure she would have yelled, “Get down from there.” But she saw nothing. I didn’t really think of avocados as food. There was no guacamole back then. At least not where we lived. It was easier to get Chinese food than Mexican food. And I honestly don’t remember anyone eating avocado. But I specifically remember avocado pits in the kitchen window in a cup of water supported by toothpicks, budding in the afternoon sun. There was always at least one in the window. None of them became avocado trees. My grandmother just like to mother them for a while, like she mothered all of us. My own mother did that a few times and lost interest. But my grandmother was always growing avocados in the window.

The insides of hedges are very much like avocado trees. Under a thin coat of leaves is a network of trunks and branches. They look solid, but essentially they are hollow. The leaves fight for sunlight. Some succeed for a while, but are edged out. Hedges exist layer after layer, though what we seem to see, or believe we see, is solidity. The leaves in this picture are busy outdoing the layer below them. The hedge looks fresh and green because what we see is the most recent layer.

Sometimes we can almost make out the pattern of the leaves. What is in fact controlled chaos, seems on the verge of order and careful design. Our eyes go from leaf to leaf, from one pattern to another, as we see what is almost but not quite there. I could spend the whole day looking at nothing but leaves.

These are tiny clusters of elongated flowers looking a bit like dangling earrings. I’m imagining a dark skinned girl with one dangling from each ear. They look almost tropical. And like so many things, one day they were invisible and the next they were unavoidable. But size is another factor. You’ll notice the foxtail in the lower left. It’s only an inch and a half in length, which shows us that everything around it is diminutive. The daisy like things below are smaller than my fingernail. But the white and red and the yellow inside these flowers call out for attention. They make one lean forward to see more clearly, and to wonder and imagine.

When I saw these flowers I was struck by the predominance of yellow. If you’ve read any of these posts, you know I am not a botanist. So I am not going to explain this coloration. But I will say that it seems unhealthy, as if some mineral is missing in the soil. And yet, when I look at the proliferation of healthy blooms I’m convinced that there is nothing unhealthy about these plants. I don’t normally quote the Bible, but a verse popped into my head as I looked at this photo. The verse, which I just Googled, is from Matthew 7:15-20. “You will know them by their fruits.” It’s actually a passage telling us how to distinguish false prophets from true prophets. Something we might all consider improving at. Here’s the whole passage from the New King James Version:

¹⁵ Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. ¹⁶ You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

The fruits or blooms of this apparently unhealthy growth appear without question to be yellow or yellowish, but very healthy nonetheless. Leading me to believe that the only “false” thing about them was my initial assessment.

I have found so many interesting things on the ground and on the sidewalk, but still… Perhaps I should look up more often.

This reminds me of a bottle brush. At least one that might be manufactured by Alessi. To be sure, I checked. They don’t sell one. But if they did it would be bright red just like this and it would work amazingly well. Flowers sort of stand on their own. There aren’t any utensils or kitchen products I can think of that are designed to look like flowers. Graphics, of course, are filled with flowers. Marimekko’s flower prints have been manufactured unchanged since I was in high school. At least that’s the first time I remember seeing them. But a picture or a print is not a three-dimensional object, and these blooms, if they are anything, are three-dimensional, and just as bright and clever as Alessi and Marimekko.

Cami, a neighbor up the street, and one of the few people I actually converse with on my walks — I also talk to her husband — saw me across the street a few days ago and wanted to run out front and yell DID YOU SEE THE NAKED LADIES? But she realized that might not be something she should yell in front of the neighbors. So she emailed me instead. As it turned out, I had seen them. They were growing in a garden patch about half a block from her house, mixed in with pumpkins and other things. Amaryllis belladonna, the naked-lady-lily, among other names, her favorite flower.

The pink flowers above are the same bunch she was going to yell about. I tiptoed into the garden today to take this picture, something I was afraid to do initially. I was afraid the lady who maintains that garden would be offended if I trudged around in it. So I tiptoed in, took the picture, looked around, and then tiptoed out.

But there are hundreds of them growing in an empty lot across from the library only two blocks up the hill. Those I was free to walk around in without bothering anyone at all. If we could see what’s going on beneath the surface of the dirt, if we could see below the changing layer of weeds, we might see numberless twisted bulbs waiting for their moment in the sun. While the pattern this time of year is dying and drying out, suddenly there are lilies. Just when you think the year is done and there is nothing left to see, life begins again.

Green crystals with occasional snow flakes. As completely un-Morro Bay a thing as I can imagine. And yet, that’s what it makes me think. The flowers are truly miniscule, and the upper layer of green is unusually bright. It’s in the front of a well manicured yard. The yellowish color can be seen almost a block away. I find the picture interesting, but the reality I find spectacular. I like to think that the owner selected this plant exactly for the reasons mentioned, though it could be nothing more than an accident. Either way, it would be just as beautiful.

This is about as rough and tough as they get. I suppose it’s the spikes around the edge, but also the distain it seems to have for its surroundings. The leaves will dissolve and blow away before this plant takes notice of them. Crab grass will come and go. The plant, whatever it might be called, is definitely there for the long haul.

This is the most ornate and most beautiful geranium I have ever seen. The backs of the petals fade into white, which carries over to the front. The red deepens into a dramatic pattern as it nears the bright white center. Anthers in orange and dark beige rest on long filaments, and the flowers cluster into thick irregular bouquets. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. There is one plant in a carefully maintained front yard under an overhanging tree, and as you can see, it is ready to burst into many more blooms. I stumble over the words in an attempt to say something meaningful.

I’ve wondered what to say about these photographs for quite some time. They are both examples of quite striking blooms, and they exist, or existed no more than two feet from each other. There are only inches between their outstretched branches, and one wonders if they won’t grow together before long. Both blooms, to my mind, are absolutely unique. I can’t begin to explain how they work, if those are leaves or petals around the one, or if a bloom can be a flower without having petals. Anyway, since I had no answer to any of these questions, I decided the real story must be the person who put them together.

It was obviously no accident. Or, at the very least, it was a very fortuitous accident. The plants are perfectly placed on a short uphill slope, just to the right of the porch. The rest of the yard is very well maintained. I use this yard as a place to slow down and rest. To notice what’s going on with the other plants. There’s even a small stream of dark colored creek rocks winding down the hill. I used it to walk up the hill when no one was looking to take these pictures.

What energy. Complicated flowers, complicated leaves, and what appears to be spent poppy stems. Flowers and leaves are interesting, but these seem hyper interesting. All with no discernible pattern. This is the opposite of controlled. It seems like sheer exuberance. It’s hard to put together sentences to capture it. There’s a point where the possible takes over and the ordinary is lost. The flowers on my desk are neat and orderly, I don’t think of them as ordinary, exactly, but these are a riot of seeming ecstasy. For all the precision of planning, we need to allow things now and then simply to live out their inner nature. These plants know what they’re doing, even if they have no idea.

Time to take a deep breath. There is nothing happier than a bunch of geraniums. There are more spectacular flowers, of course, but nothing that warms the heart quite like a geranium. I have felt that since I was a child. I wonder if it's their clustering, their casualness or their inherent imperfection. Not every geranium, but most geraniums, say something, have always said something that draws me to them.

These flowers are about one block away from each other. Each doing its special thing. Reddish and purplish, each on a dark green base. It’s hard for me to pass them without my heart being moved. I almost always stop to rest where I find geraniums. I try unsuccessfully to figure out what attracts me to them, or them to me. I doubt that I’m of any special importance to geraniums, but who knows the heart or how it works? There are so many questions, but also so many beautiful geraniums.

It’s hard to tell what or how much is going on here. I have seen some rather amazing botanical things and slowly figured out what I thought was the pattern behind them. But this picture disturbs me because I don’t really have any idea beyond the blue petals which seem to make sense. The rest is beyond me. Are those leaves in the shape of caterpillars? And is that a seed pod in the middle? Everything is turned inside out and end before beginning. Maybe there’s a sensible explanation that I’ve overlooked. But what on earth could it be?

Perhaps I’m too easily pleased, but this flower, if indeed it’s called a flower, reminds me of 4th of July fireworks, bursting and then bursting again. Its setting is decidedly ordinary, but its form is remarkable. I know nothing about the plant that produced it, it seems buried beneath pumpkin leaves — you can see just a hint of pumpkin at the top — but I’m glad that I stopped to look. A few days later, it wasn’t there. Only the memory of it and lazy leaves soaking up the sun.

On the 10th of May I posted something about an unusual variety of very common flowers in these parts: Yellow Poppy. I said “poppy” because there was exactly one at that time. The poppies here, of course, are golden poppies. California is the Golden State. The yellow one was near the back entrance of the library. What I never showed was how it grew into a mass of yellow poppies that were clearly visible a block away.

Last month, on the 23rd and 24th, I posted Before… and After about a strip of poppies growing in a six inch space between the sidewalk and a fence. The two posts showed them new and then almost gone. Poppies grow with determination and then die. But they return year after year with equal vengeance, and have done so, I imagine, almost forever.

Today’s picture shows what’s left of the yellow poppies. It shows how wildly they grew and how completely they died, except for the spate of seed pods strewn at their wouldbe feet. The pods are full of life. After the first rains next fall we should expect many more yellow poppies.

Could more aluring color be squeezed into a tiny space? There is so much intensity in these things between the dirt and the vibrant colors that it seems unrealistic. The old and the new strangely coexist. But in reality it is more a contest between the ordinary and science fiction, between color edged green and neon lights. What bug in his right mind would fly or walk past these glaring advertisements and not stop to consider them?

These flowers must be relatives. They each have the look of tissue pressed into the shape of a flower, with some daubs of pain on the upper ones. They remind me, as I said in White is for…, Veterans Day Flowers. The things worn on your lapel (when most people had lapels) to show that you contributed to a veterans fund. I haven’t seen any here since I was young, but they are still very popular in England.

How do they manage to get so crinkled? Is it because there is just too much petal for the space allowed? Or is it more complicated than that? The most beautiful things have a tendency to look fake, or so I’ve been told. That’s what my oldest son explained to me when he was seven or eight. He looked across the Klamath River at a stunning display of plants and hills, took a deep breath and said, “It looks fake, doesn’t it?” He meant that as the highest possible compliment.

Well, I said that flowers like these look like tissue pressed into the shape of flowers, which means they must look fake. But fake can be both pejorative and breathtakingly beautiful.

This is an unusual bloom. The petals on the front side are bright white, but on their backsides they are deep yellow. You can see them here in various stages of development. The petals seem to curl open. From the ground view they are yellow, from above they are white. I was baffled by them at first. More daisies, I thought. But the yellow. Where is the yellow coming from? It turns out that the better question might be where is the white coming from? I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on. Is it just a twist in the DNA? Were they once yellow and white before merging? Or is this more than a tiny accident? Are bugs attracted to what seems like an optical illusion? Sometimes flowers bring more questions than answers. Sometimes daisies are not daisies at all.

From a completely neglected piece of ground, this refusal to accept defeat. A good gardener might have already dug this up and planted something worthwhile, but there is no gardener, no watering hose, no nothing. Just the stunning beauty of four flowers that look like astroemeria and the possibility of continuance. How much we could learn from plants if we just knew how to listen.

A short time ago in Lessons I posted a picture of a windblown white flower with a beautiful yellow center. It was the only flower in a small plant hugging the ground. Today I passed the same plant but to my surprise found it filled with blooms in alternating colors: white and lavender. So far as I can tell, they are growing from the same root. It’s not the first time I’ve seen different flowers, at least different colored flowers, growing from the same plant. In fact, it seems like a persistent theme. I love the windblown nature of the white one, but I also love the lavender color of its sister, or perhaps only friend. Together, alternating, they are stunning.

These are obviously geraniums, though in fact there’s only a 50/50 chance they’re not pelargoniums, which look exactly like geraniums. But with a half-million flowers currently cataloged, does it really matter what we call them? Whatever it is, it’s bound to be wrong, if not to everyone, then at least to the experts. They are spilling over the same wall as the flowers yesterday. In the background you can see a piece of the Rec Hall of St. Vincent’s Church. At least I’m calling it a Rec Hall. They probably call it something like Community Hall, or Community Center. I’ve had lintel soup for lunch and chicken for dinner there. Catholics tend to be warm hearted and outgoing people. At least to me they do. Three of my neighbors attend services there. These geraniums grew up and over the wall in a spectacular, if not manic spurt of growth. Is it prayer driven or fertilizer driven? It seems like the happiest wall in town. Flowers and flowers and flowers, the way all churches should be in summer.

Spilling over the church wall. I thought I knew the name of this flower. But when I looked it up, it was a different flower. At some point in the future we should be able to submit photographs to Google and find out what we’re looking at. That seems like something to avoid, but sometimes we really just want to know what we’re looking at. My neighbor spends a lot of time at garden centers and comes home with the names of plants that seem almost made up. I suppose I’ve spent my entire life trying not to pay close attention to the names of plants. They seem arbitrary and about to change. We might see a hundred bugs in a day, or a hundred flowers and not know the exact name of any of them. Bugs and flowers are bugs and flowers.

Louis XIV was the founder of the Observatoire de Paris in the year 1667. If I remember correctly, the king visited the observatory run by Gian Domenico Cassini, a name I owe to Google, and looked through the telescope. It was focused on something interesting and Cassini gave him the name of it. The king looked again, looked cautiously around him, and then said rather quietly, “Yes, but what’s its real name?”

My college French teacher had a theory about that question. Usually the story is repeated by anti-royalists to indicate what a moron the king was. But her theory… The more I try to remember her theory the less it comes back to me. She was a great believer in royalty. But that's all I remember. It's rather hard to think of Louis XIV as an idiot if you can't quite remember why he wasn't.

In January I wrote something in First Signs of Weakness that predicted the death of a weed that had grown too suddenly and far too large. It was taller than the fence. It started to turn brown, but that must have been something temporary like a cold. There are now five of them showing the same growth cycle in a staggered row. They are starting to look like trees.

I have tried to ignore them. But today I caught a flash of color and felt like I did when I first noticed a Nasturtium Flower and thought why on earth would nasturtiums need flowers? Well, the gigantic weed has occasional flowers not on the surface, but almost hidden inside. I hesitate to call them beautiful, though they do have a lovely color, because they associate themselves with something almost hideous. But if you see just the flower and ignore all the rest, I suppose they might be rather good looking.

I don’t have much more to say. I’m hoping the gardener will work up the courage to chop these down and leave me with a vague memory of large weeds, so that passing this area becomes more comfortable, more relaxing. But for the record, here’s the flower.

Here is a tiny portion of a truckload of fire wood with a black chord that doesn’t seem to belong there. Some buds grow into trees, get cut down, dried out, and then split and cut into fireplace or stove sized pieces to keep us warm or make it possible to cook. It’s the same process as weeds in the garden, but with more time involved and much greater utility. If properly replanted, the process goes on forever, or close enough for humans who pass away with rapidity.

Years ago I knew a man who made his living cutting down orange groves. Where once there were orange trees as far as the eye could see, now there are houses and shopping centers, and asphalt highways, cars, and pollution. His crew uprooted the trees, stripped the branches and then cut mountains of firewood. He saved all the wood from his last job and had it trucked up to his house in the hills, and stacked neatly in rows until he had his own personal mountain of firewood. Orange tree firewood. It was difficult to like this man, but of course someone else would have done the job if he hadn’t. Orange trees were not the future.

He had enough firewood in his mountain to burn fires every day for years. And that’s exactly what he did. He lit a fire and kept it burning all day, every day, through hot and cold, because he adored the scent and the crackle of orange firewood. He did not replant. The process will not go on forever. We eat oranges from Florida and Texas now. I’m guessing we also get them from Mexico and elsewhere. At least, so long as they continue to grow oranges. So long as they resist the urge to uproot the trees. So long as the last tree does not become firewood.

Through a tangle of leaves or blades, not perfect, but heading in that direction. A single flower that seems almost as if someone picked it somewhere else and placed it here. I found it in the front planter of the library as I walked home with nothing near but this bed of leaves or blades. I walked there again today and there must be hundreds of them. Timing, as they say, is everything.

This plant, and I could be wrong, seems very clever. It’s rather unpredictably, but semi-permanently in bloom. In other words, it seems to flower now and then, here and there, in a process that keeps it modestly in bloom for lengthy periods of time. Here a flower, there a flower, a kind of blooming that is nothing less then completely controlled. It is also, though this probably has nothing to do with it, very pretty. It gives the bees and bugs a chance to learn where it is, and to keep being there when they remember. Something for everyone, almost all the time. It has looked the same, but different, every time I passed. It’s a lot more clever than I am.