Poppies

 I love flowers... natural flowers in the wild, or at least untended blossoms. Horticulturally perfect do not appeal nearly as much as when nature is at work. The bees, the wind, the birds, and the occasional genetic misstep. 

The Kentucky Department of Roads plants flowers or grasses at various interchanges, medians, or margins along the highways. Several around Elizabethtown are planted with safflowers or poppies. The poppies have such a short life... some years I see them and some years I miss them entirely.

Here are a few from the last time I managed to catch them. 

Hey Look at ME!!!

Red Poppy and Daisies

Reminds me of a Tutu

Bud with a cap

Poppies are the favorite at the moment. Tomorrow it might be a weed with a butterfly.

Beth

Going Slow

 

When I am out and about with the camera (rarely when I am running errands, cleaning, or otherwise in work mode)... I try to go slow.

A Bee

I have found that -if I go slow enough to see the smallest bugs and flowers I will see so much more. So looking closely and down low I sometimes see bugs and small flowers that are so tiny that even close up they are still small. I think it is also a metaphor for living daily. If you move so fast that you only stop at the big stuff you miss so much!!!

I really never knew there are so many different kinds and sizes of bees/pollinators. I don't know what kind this one is, but it is yellow and about 3/8's of an inch. They are everywhere in Kentucky. I only remember about 5 different kinds of bees from growing up in CA. Most of them were mean with stingers, (honeybees are the exception, they have stingers but are not considered mean).

Butterflies Big and Small

Of course, butterflies are both, big and small.  A Swallowtail butterfly is huge and easy to see. In Kentucky the Swallowtails are plentiful. I don't ever get tired of seeing them. As a child in northern California, we would see maybe one or two a summer.

On the other hand, a Grey Hairstreak on a just blooming clover flower shows how small butterflies can be. This little butterfly would not cover a nickel. The Hairstreaks are very shy and don't sit still for long, and rarely have the wings open while resting.

Monarch pre-butterfly

During the summer I check the milkweed for the caterpillars of the monarch butterflies. This little fellow is feasting on the milkweed leaves.  I am hoping to have some milkweed volunteer at the pond. I am going to plant some wildflowers and encourage the milkweed to grow there too.

Flowers

The wildflowers also make me stop. This is Ironweed. It grows tall and not crowded in open grassy areas. I love to see it when it is growing with yellow flowers, like the Bearded Beggarticks.

Not a butterfly, but pretty enough

Another winged vibrant creature is a moth. This is a Rosy Maple Moth. I think it should be called the Cotton Candy moth. A bug that has some very interesting colorways.  This one was spotted while house hunting in the early summer of 2019 when life was still normal!!!

A lesson about seeing

So about that go-slow approach. We really learned about it in Africa. No wonder there were so many tales about dangerous animals, If you went fast you missed seeing them altogether. This was a picture I took in the South African bush.  It is amazing to me how sparse the landscape would look... spindly trees, big open spaces, and grasses... Makes you wonder how anything could hide when you can see so far.

More later. Beth