making sacrifices for art

my husband and i have been coaxing along a little patch of native wild blue flag irises on either side of our dock. each fall we break open all the seed pods and encourage them to find a fertile place to take root. what started as a few stray plants is now a modest but vigorous patch on either side of the boardwalk. it’s been slow and patient work. the kind of work that grows almost geologically over years. so when my husband saw that i had snipped these two stems today for STILL, he was…well . . . let’s say he took the side of nature over art.

wild blue flag iris (Iris versicolor)

botanical confetti

this is the debris from yesterday’s flower arrangement. it was supposed to be swept up and tossed in the yard, but something about it was just a little bit too happy. so i threw it like confetti, in celebration of anything and everything. it has been a year of whatever the opposite is of celebration. for five minutes i decided to remember that there is beauty everywhere and be happy about it, before resuming what i hope is a respectful session of attentiveness and openness to the new world our young people are making out of the debris we left them.

roadside wildflower petals

high summer

the colors of the flowers? the shapes of the stems? the variety of the leaves? the tiny tendrils at the end of the vetch? i can’t choose. all i can say is, it’s high summer. and it’s real pretty out there.

summer wildflowers

summer solstice

this guy greeted us on the way down to the dock today, then turned and sprinted away despite, if you look closely, his stump of a right front foot. i ran to get some white paper to snap his portrait, and the expression on his face pretty much sums up what his thoughts appeared to be on the subject of being detained in the middle of a busy day.

painted turtle

even better

i saw that wild parsnip was blooming a few days ago and made a mental note. you know by now i am sucker for all botanical umbellates. as often happens to me, when i went to finally photograph them, they had just finished blooming, only a suspicion of their yellow flowers remained. i was just about to walk away when i noticed this little guy on one of the leaves. a caterpillar that i thought was a monarch, but that research revealed to be a black swallowtail caterpiller! ding, ding, ding. all my senses lit up in delight. if you can, zoom in on him and notice the comical little face on his butt that’s meant to fool predators. it makes me wonder…do animals really understand a frown?

black swallowtail caterpillar on wild parsnip (Papilio polyxenes)