Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Some New Flowers Appeared Today





I drove from Quincy to Greenville for the first time in 6 days, and there have been some exciting changes. Last week I photographed the Heartleaf Milkweed when it sported only unopened buds. Today there were lots of open flowers and they're quite beautiful. This warm spot just north of Indian Falls has them blooming a couple of weeks ahead of my other favorite milkweed spots. More on milkweeds later. We have at least three different kinds in this area.
Next discovery was in the spot where I photographed Showy Phlox last week. Now the Sulfur Pea vines are invading it and the two species look great together, the phlox a bright pink and the pea, shown above, a mixture of bright yellow and orange.
Then I saw my first Fritillary of the season. Usually these plants get two to three feet tall before blooming, but this group of flowers was on the ground and the stem of the plant looked as though it was a victim of the recent snow storm.
Last, the first dogwood I've seen this season although I've reports of others in the area. This one is on the edge of Hwy 70/89 in the vicinity of the Keddie Y railroad trestles.
I had trouble focusing on these brief flower notes because I just read in the local paper about a forthcoming visit to Quincy of a "Dr." Mace Baker, a "scientific creationist" fraud, if you'll forgive me for being redundant. "Scientific Creationist" will be an entry in a book I'm planning called "Cell Phone Etiquette and Other Oxymorons." Perhaps more on this Baker fellow in a later post. Suffice to say his Ph.D. is from Pacific International University, which isn't even a real school. You can start by "Googling" it - and him. Check out his website, then read other websites "about" him. The idiocy involved never ceases to amaze me.

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