Flowers in the Meadow

Some would call them all just 'weeds', but the wildflowers in the meadow are spectacular at the moment.  Yellow of the trefoil, cinquefoil and brown-eyed susans seems to predominate, but there are a lot of flashes of purple from the vetch and the viper's bugloss, along with white and pink.  It's just a jungle of grasses, weeds, and sparkling bright flowers.

The brown-eyed susans are just beginning; we'll have a large bright patch where I threw in some prairie seed mixture about 5 or 6 years ago.  They took 3 years to get started, but now they're spectacular.

It's impossible to capture the vision my eyes see, but here's my best shot so far.  I know I will go on experimenting with meadow shots to try and capture an image of the flowered landscape..

There's the light pale yellow of the cinquefoil, scattered here and there, fairly sparse compared to the others.

There's the bright deep yellow of the trefoil, widely escaped from pasture and hay mixtures, commonly lining roadsides at this time of year. It seems to be everywhere.

There's little point in trying to get pictures of the vetch without a European skipper or two; they're everywhere - these two locked in coital bliss.

There are three skippers visiting this viper's bugloss, one of the most unusual weedy plants in my mind.  Close-up it's beautiful, and it's one of the few true blue flowers, in places lining roadsides instead of the trefoil.

Put these together with the mallow, and at time it's just a jungle of foliage and colour, again with a visiting skipper or two fluttering through the picture..  

The musk mallow comes in both white and pink in our area; scattered blooms colour the meadow, the roadside and the ditches.

I'm linking this post to 'Today's Flowers'.

Flowers in the Field

At this time of year the daisies, buttercups, and hawkweeds - the 'King Devil' and the 'Devil's Paintbrush' - turn the meadow colourful with their blooms among the grasses.  Especially in the morning of a sunny day the flowers all come out and turn toward the sun, leaving the meadow sparkling with yellow stars.  But what the human eye sees is very hard to capture with a camera.  This is the best photo I've managed:

On the other hand, what the human eye does not immediately leap to, a close-up, the camera can capture beautifully.  The yellow hawkweed or King Devil seems most prolific in our meadow.

But my favourite is the Devil's Paintbrush, or Orange Hawkweed (not to be confused with the Indian Paintbrush found up in the Bruce Peninsula of Ontario).  It provides bright red-orange flashes among the dominant yellow 'weeds'.  Do I really dare call these wildflowers rather than weeds?

Again, a close-up captures a much better view of the incredible colours of these wildflowers.  How can something that looks so striking be considered a 'weed'?

At the same time, buttercups are dotting the meadow, and in some nearby pastures providing a carpet of yellow.  The pistils and stamens in the centre of the flower are such an identical yellow to the petals that it's hard to get a picture showing the details; there just isn't enough contrast.

And in patches here and there, along the roadside ditches and beside the old fences, the daisies are in bloom - sometimes enough of them to make a field look white.  Getting them to stand still long enough for a good picture was a challenge.

We notice the bright colours, and  think of the pretty flowers, but when you look closely, the details of nature's design are really incredible, all in a field full of weeds.

Close-ups!

So I got a new macro lens for my camera - for one of those 'big' birthdays - and guess what?  I'm hooked.  I could be out there all day taking close-ups of anything and everything.  I now have so many pictures to share that I don't know where to start!

This is 'just a weed', a goat's beard, growing in the meadow in our backyard.  It's one of those sun sensitive plants that opens in the light of morning, and turns to face the sun, a pattern known as 'phototropism'.  Standing in the right location, the meadow is twinkling with little yellow dots everywhere you look.

 

 When you look closely, it's amazing, the stamens and pistils and the pollen grains all visible in great detail.

And this of course is 'just another weed', one of the most prolific - 2 or 3 weeks ago the fields were yellow with these dandelions.  Now they've gone to seed, and you understand why they're so prolific when you see the number of seeds ready to blow across the landscape.

And again, when you take a close look, it's so intricate.  The patterns of nature never cease to be amazing.