a photo every day can sometimes amount to drudgery. it may look a little bit glamorous, but so does raising a child, when you don’t have to account for all those diaper changes. it’s easy to say that the discipline of the process is its own reward, but sometimes the discipline is just discipline, like running 5 miles again today, or doing another 25 pushups. today was one of those days. i looked at my husband at about 3:00 pm, and asked whether he had any ideas for still blog. he sort of drifted away and never answered. and i didn’t have any ideas either. so while i’m not claiming that this is one of my most inspired posts ever, i would say that the ratio of end quality to original inspiration is as high as can reasonably be expected, 4 years and 5 months into this project, which is to say, 1,623 images after my first post, on january 1, 2012.

rose petals, bleeding heart, red bud, forget-me-nots, creeping charlie, lilac, juniper berries, iris, wild indigo

saint paul, minnesota

every year after this will be a year in which a woman has already been nominated as the presidential candidate of a major american political party. don’t let anyone tell you it’s all going to hell these days. these are the golden years, and starting today, no girl can ever believe again that being the most powerful person in the world is impossible merely because of the particular arrangement of her chromosomes at birth.

bits of gold

i couldn’t identify this one for the life of me. i spent almost an hour bumbling through descriptions, and trying a reverse google image search. then i looked at the original plant again and noticed that the seed heads were sort of umbel shaped, and so i googled mn wildflowers with umbels, which led me first to a leaf that looked right, and that leaf led me to aniseroot, and aniseroot led me to these seed heads. i just rolled one between my fingers. yup . . . anise. score! plant geekery for the win.

aniseroot seeds

sucker lake regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

these are the horizontal branches from the crown of an agave stalk in west texas, and i love the color they turned as they aged. weathered wood in minnesota usually means exposure to water. these just got baked in the texas desert. and they have an almost charred aspect that i found oddly beautiful. not to mention how much i loved that such withered, dried-out twigs came from a plant that gave its name to the whole family of succulents. west texas is a delightfully weird place. right down to its dessicated succulents.

agave flower (century flower?) stems

marfa, texas