flowering summer
Aug. 10th, 2022 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliA cloud towers among others, which are darkening with evening. This one shines gleaming white still. An hour later, all the rounded clouds are gleaming golden with sunset.
A house is turning feral. All around the lawn is mowed, but vines grow thickly on it, and trees nearly hide it -- trees clearly sprouted there and growing because they were too close to the house to easily mow.
The sunroses close with evening, but the ice plants are fussier: they do not even open for a cloudy day.
The pink sunroses must lose their bluish pigments first; they are turning a shade of coral, and by the right light, look as orange as the orange ones.
Ah, the visit to Elizabeth Park! Many irises are past, though the ones by the lake are a lovely violet, and those in the perennial garden a beautiful blue. The roses blooming, single, double, many-petalled, in red and white and every shade of pink. One rose growing on the fence looks white but is pink mostly bleached away, the flowers sheltered from the sun being half-hidden, and one rose, even so early, is past its prime with lavender flowers looking ragged.
About the grass hop and flit -- grackle fledglings? Their bodies are the right dingy brownish black that catches iridescent blue but their heads are simply a flat if deep brown and not iridescent at all.
The air is luminous with seeds in their white puffs of fluff, glowing in the evening light.
A bush is covered with tiny white blossom, not even open wide, so they look like tiny berries, but the bumblebees love them, though they dwarf the flowers.
A rainbow arches down out of the sky. Its double appears, brightens, fades, vanishes.
The green on the roadside spreads in differing shades. One place only reveals by its total flatness that it is a scum-covered pond and not a field.
At the bottom of the valley, though the forget-me-nots in my garden are almost gone, the marshlands have great bushes filled with forget-me-nots -- though not where they first grew, years ago, in a place that since suffered the most from rainstorm inspired flooding. And where the waters go over the concrete slabs downward, one side has been turned into a pool, with rocks piled up in a semicircle that shows no outlet. Water is endlessly if in small proportions flowing in. Perhaps it seeps through the rocks.
A hawk soared on the hot rising air, its wings so rigid that it looks like an airplane -- distance and so size being impossible to judge.
The geese stand on the road, towering over the smaller -- ducks, not goslings.
A heron crouches over the pond, its head outstretched as it hunts.
Before the building stand the row of roses, pink and pale orange and yellow and so pastel it looks like a candy shop.
So windy the day that the bumblebee, black and pale gold, hangs on the butterfly weed's mass of orange flowers without twitching its wings or legs. The flower has bent over, and it does not want to be blown off.
A tiny little dog comes toward me to investigate. The first thing its nose encounters is my purse. Sniff, sniff, sniff -- and withdraw, with the conclusion that the purse is not so nice.
A bird swoops over the road, backlit but its wings showing they are orange-brown, and not because the sunlight shone through them.
A field of grass going to seed has a sprawling stand of tiger lilies in full bloom. Wherever the grass is tall, there are flowers. Often ragged robin in purple, sometimes a bank of pink sweet peas, and often enough tiger lilies, sometimes in enough of a line that you wonder whether it's technically feral since it could still be the garden where they were allowed to multiply
The forests differ by summer. Some are, within, all bright and dark green intermixed where sunlight shines through these leaves, and other part are still shadow, and dancing with every breeze, with bars of dark among them where trunks stand. Others are darker, with only spots of light here and there.
A garden is mulch-covered, but where the pavement at the edge broke, a feral petunia is blooming in purple.
The maples have the dark red leaves, almost black, but where the sunlight strikes, they gleam whitely. When a breeze blows, it ripples in red-black and white.
The lake is filling with waterlilies, the pads the drab green, the flowers all a delicate red verging on pink.
Ah, the stands of flowers -- butter and eggs in yellow and orange, black-eyed susans in yellow, tiger lilies in orange -- here, there, and everywhere.
The day inches onward, and the eaves cast shadows on the wall. They do not reach the snapdragons yet, and against the dark shadow, with light blazing through them, they glow in yellow and pink and orange and red.
The wayside has here, bright blue cornflowers that look like a surprise on the drab dun of the drought-stricken grass, but clash; there, a stand of yellowing grass harmonizing with delicate white of Queen Anne's lace, and the bright blue cornflowers; and over there, ugly stalks of dried seed, deep brown. Here and there pale violet spreads like a mist as they speed by; when passed more slowly, they are like smaller thistles, but still so thick and so small they look spread over it like a veil.
In the midst of the tree is a single bough of bright yellow leaves, though it is high summer.
The grass is low and ungrowing, an odd patchwork of the small green splotches showing where the water is greater and the drab yellow, and amidst it all, flowers grow, towering over in the drought, though not yet flowering.
The rainfall brings green blades spreading out, and oddly enough makes the dried grass look more reddish. And then it brings flowering, with small wildflowers of blue and white, petals as fine as an aster's, with yellow hearts.
A brilliantly yellow butterfly flits about the tree branches outside the window. The next day, three of those branches bear yellow leaves among the green.
A groundhog has discovered a happy hunting grounds for clover in the roadside down a hill, with a grove beside the narrow band of lawn. There day after day. Though it's not the only one. Rabbits sometimes. Once a critter with a back of solid cream color, the skunk not having two stripes.
The parking lot island has stands of orange lilies and ornamental grass all gold in its seed, and the sun shines through it to make a fiery glory. Looking at it from the other side loses by comparison.
The roadside froths with Queen Anne's lace in delicate white.
A garden is set with brilliantly orange and yellow stands of lilies, interchanging to lovely effect.
Hummingbirds! One flitted about one evening, and then the next day another come and hovered before the front stoup, until another flitted up and they soared up and away. (Certainly enough red trumpet flowers about to appease them.)
A foaming cloud rises, brilliant white, over a gray expansive one, before the sunset. As nightfall approaches, it turns swiftly dove gray as the cloud below turned charcoal gray.
A swallowtail perches on a leadwort as best it can, its pale yellow wings beating to keep on the bright blue flower perhaps a tenth its size.
Goldfinches are early this year. One perched on a coneflower and tried to peck away the seeds when the flower was still in bloom. (Some have gone to seed. At least one has been gobbled up by birds.)
Weeks after yellowing leaves, and even trees more than half yellow, the first red leaf is spied among branches. Within hours, another red sprig is seen, topping a tree.
The lawn has the bright, sprightly green that, in this drought, indicates that crab grass has taken over entirely.
Ah, the rains. The downpours while the sky still looks blue, because the clouds are overhead, leaving doubts that the garden got any (it did). The sunlit green boughs before the cobalt blue towering clouds, and a single lightning bolt plunges, in the distance, straight down and pure white. The later clouds, still cobalt blue but with sunlight slanting over, and leaves gleaming from the glancing light. The sun nearly set and a rainbow arching, more broad than high, in the soft, pure colors, with just a bit of a double rainbow.
The goldfinches are migrating. This is shown by the way a dozen of them flitted off the coneflowers at the sign of a person passing by. Without getting much of their meal, though many a coneflower has gone to seed.
A house is turning feral. All around the lawn is mowed, but vines grow thickly on it, and trees nearly hide it -- trees clearly sprouted there and growing because they were too close to the house to easily mow.
The sunroses close with evening, but the ice plants are fussier: they do not even open for a cloudy day.
The pink sunroses must lose their bluish pigments first; they are turning a shade of coral, and by the right light, look as orange as the orange ones.
Ah, the visit to Elizabeth Park! Many irises are past, though the ones by the lake are a lovely violet, and those in the perennial garden a beautiful blue. The roses blooming, single, double, many-petalled, in red and white and every shade of pink. One rose growing on the fence looks white but is pink mostly bleached away, the flowers sheltered from the sun being half-hidden, and one rose, even so early, is past its prime with lavender flowers looking ragged.
About the grass hop and flit -- grackle fledglings? Their bodies are the right dingy brownish black that catches iridescent blue but their heads are simply a flat if deep brown and not iridescent at all.
The air is luminous with seeds in their white puffs of fluff, glowing in the evening light.
A bush is covered with tiny white blossom, not even open wide, so they look like tiny berries, but the bumblebees love them, though they dwarf the flowers.
A rainbow arches down out of the sky. Its double appears, brightens, fades, vanishes.
The green on the roadside spreads in differing shades. One place only reveals by its total flatness that it is a scum-covered pond and not a field.
At the bottom of the valley, though the forget-me-nots in my garden are almost gone, the marshlands have great bushes filled with forget-me-nots -- though not where they first grew, years ago, in a place that since suffered the most from rainstorm inspired flooding. And where the waters go over the concrete slabs downward, one side has been turned into a pool, with rocks piled up in a semicircle that shows no outlet. Water is endlessly if in small proportions flowing in. Perhaps it seeps through the rocks.
A hawk soared on the hot rising air, its wings so rigid that it looks like an airplane -- distance and so size being impossible to judge.
The geese stand on the road, towering over the smaller -- ducks, not goslings.
A heron crouches over the pond, its head outstretched as it hunts.
Before the building stand the row of roses, pink and pale orange and yellow and so pastel it looks like a candy shop.
So windy the day that the bumblebee, black and pale gold, hangs on the butterfly weed's mass of orange flowers without twitching its wings or legs. The flower has bent over, and it does not want to be blown off.
A tiny little dog comes toward me to investigate. The first thing its nose encounters is my purse. Sniff, sniff, sniff -- and withdraw, with the conclusion that the purse is not so nice.
A bird swoops over the road, backlit but its wings showing they are orange-brown, and not because the sunlight shone through them.
A field of grass going to seed has a sprawling stand of tiger lilies in full bloom. Wherever the grass is tall, there are flowers. Often ragged robin in purple, sometimes a bank of pink sweet peas, and often enough tiger lilies, sometimes in enough of a line that you wonder whether it's technically feral since it could still be the garden where they were allowed to multiply
The forests differ by summer. Some are, within, all bright and dark green intermixed where sunlight shines through these leaves, and other part are still shadow, and dancing with every breeze, with bars of dark among them where trunks stand. Others are darker, with only spots of light here and there.
A garden is mulch-covered, but where the pavement at the edge broke, a feral petunia is blooming in purple.
The maples have the dark red leaves, almost black, but where the sunlight strikes, they gleam whitely. When a breeze blows, it ripples in red-black and white.
The lake is filling with waterlilies, the pads the drab green, the flowers all a delicate red verging on pink.
Ah, the stands of flowers -- butter and eggs in yellow and orange, black-eyed susans in yellow, tiger lilies in orange -- here, there, and everywhere.
The day inches onward, and the eaves cast shadows on the wall. They do not reach the snapdragons yet, and against the dark shadow, with light blazing through them, they glow in yellow and pink and orange and red.
The wayside has here, bright blue cornflowers that look like a surprise on the drab dun of the drought-stricken grass, but clash; there, a stand of yellowing grass harmonizing with delicate white of Queen Anne's lace, and the bright blue cornflowers; and over there, ugly stalks of dried seed, deep brown. Here and there pale violet spreads like a mist as they speed by; when passed more slowly, they are like smaller thistles, but still so thick and so small they look spread over it like a veil.
In the midst of the tree is a single bough of bright yellow leaves, though it is high summer.
The grass is low and ungrowing, an odd patchwork of the small green splotches showing where the water is greater and the drab yellow, and amidst it all, flowers grow, towering over in the drought, though not yet flowering.
The rainfall brings green blades spreading out, and oddly enough makes the dried grass look more reddish. And then it brings flowering, with small wildflowers of blue and white, petals as fine as an aster's, with yellow hearts.
A brilliantly yellow butterfly flits about the tree branches outside the window. The next day, three of those branches bear yellow leaves among the green.
A groundhog has discovered a happy hunting grounds for clover in the roadside down a hill, with a grove beside the narrow band of lawn. There day after day. Though it's not the only one. Rabbits sometimes. Once a critter with a back of solid cream color, the skunk not having two stripes.
The parking lot island has stands of orange lilies and ornamental grass all gold in its seed, and the sun shines through it to make a fiery glory. Looking at it from the other side loses by comparison.
The roadside froths with Queen Anne's lace in delicate white.
A garden is set with brilliantly orange and yellow stands of lilies, interchanging to lovely effect.
Hummingbirds! One flitted about one evening, and then the next day another come and hovered before the front stoup, until another flitted up and they soared up and away. (Certainly enough red trumpet flowers about to appease them.)
A foaming cloud rises, brilliant white, over a gray expansive one, before the sunset. As nightfall approaches, it turns swiftly dove gray as the cloud below turned charcoal gray.
A swallowtail perches on a leadwort as best it can, its pale yellow wings beating to keep on the bright blue flower perhaps a tenth its size.
Goldfinches are early this year. One perched on a coneflower and tried to peck away the seeds when the flower was still in bloom. (Some have gone to seed. At least one has been gobbled up by birds.)
Weeks after yellowing leaves, and even trees more than half yellow, the first red leaf is spied among branches. Within hours, another red sprig is seen, topping a tree.
The lawn has the bright, sprightly green that, in this drought, indicates that crab grass has taken over entirely.
Ah, the rains. The downpours while the sky still looks blue, because the clouds are overhead, leaving doubts that the garden got any (it did). The sunlit green boughs before the cobalt blue towering clouds, and a single lightning bolt plunges, in the distance, straight down and pure white. The later clouds, still cobalt blue but with sunlight slanting over, and leaves gleaming from the glancing light. The sun nearly set and a rainbow arching, more broad than high, in the soft, pure colors, with just a bit of a double rainbow.
The goldfinches are migrating. This is shown by the way a dozen of them flitted off the coneflowers at the sign of a person passing by. Without getting much of their meal, though many a coneflower has gone to seed.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-11 10:43 am (UTC)These are wonderful summer images.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-12 01:15 am (UTC)