Pinus ponderosa
I am not entirely sure what stage of this bloom this image captures. First it's a hard purple-wine-colored bud, and then it's like this as it heads toward being a cone, so I'm calling this the flower.
Planting Ponderosa pine seedlings in the prairie thirty years ago this month is what started it all. It was a weedy alfalfa field, but a friend of mine knew about free little tree seedlings left over from the University of Idaho plant sale, and I got a bunch that I planted randomly all over the property. About a third of them got mowed, but now there are a bunch of c.30-foot pine trees out there, looking like real trees. They form an important habitat for a lot of native plants, which sprout under their dappled shade. I used the photo below to try to capture the white yarrow clouds (which it doesn't really quite do), but I will use it again here to show some of these pines.
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