the evolutionary necessity of beauty

so this smoke bush somehow made itself unavoidably beautiful, and i harvested it in order to look at it longer than I could look at it if i simply drove by. and then i took its photo, and i will dispose of it somewhere in our woods, and perhaps a new smoke bush will emerge as a result of all of those seeds waiting to fall, among the ethereal and almost unbelievable haze of its blossoms. and who is to say that that is not evolution, favoring beauty over ugliness?

smoke bush (smoketree)

smoke bush, who knew?

smoke bush has very sneakily, almost imperceptibly, wormed its way to the top of my list of favorite STILL blog subjects. there is a chance, which i will neither confirm nor deny, that a photo exists of me breaking this outer branch off of the smokebush tree of a perfect stranger. for the sake of art, you see. and love. and maybe breaking the rules.

smoke bush (aka smoketree)

warp speed

it seems like just yesterday i was posting about spring things–like catkins and spruce tips, and yet already the grass is waist high and going to seed. wait? what? i know time speeds up as you get older, but this isn’t an acceleration. this feels like hyperspace.

prairie tall grass gone to seed

every june

every june our roadsides bloom with a profusion of these tall, elegant, and stately pink thistles. and every july our hardworking and friendly, if terribly misguided, DOT crews come by with their roadside brush cutters and mow them down. so every june, i try to complete a small, useful harvest, before the big, pointless harvest.

musk (or nodding) thistle flowers

lushness

steve and i are making plans to return to languedoc this fall for another 6-month stay.  this is now familiar territory for us. we know what we have to do to vacate our lives for half a year, and we also know what to expect when we arrive. what we will encounter is a dry, arid, prickly place with fifty varieties of thistles and almost no soft lobed, and lush vegetation except for that one inexplicable exception the fig tree. so, i have found myself thinking lately about how i ought to be trying to capture the lush abundance of a midwestern summer, because soon enough i will be in low growing scrub, thirsty and sharp, and smelling like bay leaves.

smoke bush leaves in summer