scarcity

had a good conversation tonight with good company. the subject of great cuisines came up, and one of our conclusions was the some great cuisines come precisely from places with impoverished soil and difficult growing conditions. in places like that, you have to learn to cook, because the ingredients aren’t just handed to you. in which case, how do we define the cuisine of our beloved northland, where the soil couldn’t be more fertile, but what is scarce is summer heat and sunshine?

le panicaut champêtre (Eryngium campestre)

languedoc, france

echinacea pallida

i just found out that the word echinacea comes from the greek word for hedgehog (echinos), because of its spiny central cone. which reminds me of the wildlife books we used to read our kids when they were little, which somehow always included the echidna, a spiny sort of hedgehog from australia. and now i also know where the word “echidna” came from. who knew that a minnesota nature blog would help me solve wildlife taxonomy questions from down under?

narrow leafed echinacea (aka pale purple coneflower)

arden hills, saint paul, minnesota

drooping

throughout a warmer than usual (but still cool) spring, and a cooler than usual early summer, we said to ourselves, “where is the warm weather? when is summer going to arrive?” and then it arrived, and our bodies acted like this sunflower. we looked away from the sun. we drooped. we pouted. “where is the cool weather?” we are saying to ourselves. “when is fall going to arrive?”

sun flower

minneapolis, minnesota

a new perspective

these daisies were sort of begging to be shot from the side, as a bouquet. they were also begging to be snipped from their stems and placed in an interesting two dimensional pattern. they were also begging to be isolated in a close up, macro-style. but i have done all of those things before, which is part of the reward of STILL blog’s dailiness. i’ve seen a lot of daisies already after 5 1/2 years, and i’ve photographed them in the most obvious ways, and then a couple of less obvious ways, and today, it was a top-down shot of a vertical bouquet, which i’ve never tried before, and which has some interesting life and movement that i wouldn’t have noticed, if i hadn’t been forced to try Plan D.

wild roadside daisies

minneapolis, minnesota

pom-poms

let the record show that for a brief time, i shook pom-poms to the beat, as the certified worst cheerleader in the history of american middle schools. be. ag-GRESS-ive. got. to be ag-GRESS-ive.

lilies

minneapolis, minnesota