First Prairie Flowers

Last year, after much spraying and mowing and spraying and mowing, vast new areas around our house and what is known as “the commons” were seeded in prairie flowers. A heavy mix of flowers. Now we get to see what comes up and blooms, and it’s promising to be a very good year for the prairie.

This afternoon, after tremendous amounts of rain that has made everything lush and green (and the overheated tennis ball lettuce turn into a pile of white mush), I went out to pick nettles for “the nettles soup experiment” (more on that later).

In with a big bunch of nettles we found three little purple flowers, new to us. Looking them up in one of the many flower identification books around here, we discovered it is common spiderwort. What a name for a glorious plant. The photo doesn’t really do it justice. It’s like the camera was overloaded with the greenery and couldn’t get the purple. I also tried to photograph it a few times indoors (we had to pick one for the identification!) and the particular shade of purple seemed completely elusive for the camera. I guess, looking closely, it is this kind of metallic violet, but it also looks deep purple to me. Anyway, it is a beauty.

Meanwhile, back behind the garden is where the real action is getting started. We have two lovely lupines in bloom. One is just off the path (close-up shot) and the other is out in the middle of a total riot of greenery. Both are surrounded, almost choked, by the beginnings of rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans) and coneflowers and all sorts of other things. Although we are as always completely impressed by the variety and loveliness of the weeds (I particularly love the purple clover, though Steve has thoroughly dismissed it by labeling it a weed), Steve pulled alfalfa as we walked and I pulled nettles (wearing gloves of course) and some mullein. “How can there be so many kinds of weeds?” I asked.

“It’s those Europeans!” he said, near disgust.

Oh the vast forms of plantlife they brought to these spaces! How will they ever be eradicated?

Since I’m not the prairie restoration specialist, I don’t mind it much at all. As for the clover, well, the first shade of the field is always purple, and they fit right in…

(Not to mention their contribution to the edible flowers I’m collecting and drying for a fancy salt experiment…)

 

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