April

Today is my wife Dona's birthday, and on every birthday since we've been married, I've gone out and cut a Grass widow (see a couple of posts before this one) for her.  Over the last few years, they have finished blooming earlier and earlier, and this year they were done blooming a week ago, so today I went out to see what flower would become the new Dona birthday flower.  Arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) won the contest.   It came from this patch, which took nearly 20 years to produce a flower (there was a post from...last year?...in which I told the tale of this patch...)--

Yes, there is a disturbing climate-change angle here...Is this just a few warm Springs or is this the new reality?  One beautiful summer flower here is the biennial Scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata), but an area that has had them in profusion for, I don't know, eight years or something, suddenly has none of them.  They are showing up elsewhere and hopefully all the seeds that were dropped last fall there will bring some back, but you've got to wonder...

Still there are many exciting things to see in this next phase of Spring.  Here a Upland larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum) showed up where I had planted nothing.  It's mature, so it appears as though it must have been there for a year or two, but I never saw it before...

Also, another favorite, Prairie star (Lithophragma glabrum) is blooming in the prairie for the first time.  I have planted probably ten clumps of these, a couple from the same drainage ditch I got the larkspur from last week, and these from a clump that showed up by a tree in the front yard years ago--I divide it every year, leave half of it by the tree and plant the other half in the prairie.  They do pretty well, but this is the first year they've bloomed...

Another tiny flower that is doing spectacularly well is Blue-eyed mary (Collinsia parviflora).  There had been quite a bit of it here, but it bloomed at almost the exact same time as a very aggressive weed called storksbill, and in eradicating the latter, I took out a lot of the former, but I've collected seed and re-establishing it has been surprisingly easy here.  It is very small, but the bloom is beautiful.