The color called “lilac” in CSS is a light purple, with equal amounts of red and blue. (The buds on this bush were a magenta, with a good deal more red than blue.) Eleven days later, this bush was almost done for the year. It looked like the flowers had indeed been lilac when fully open and were fading to lavender and then white.
Red maples flower
and greet returning warmth with
rubies in the sky.
Any bee could set U straight,
“Dandelions are just great.
Where these yellow flowers thrive,
I get nectar for my hive.”
Any bee could let U know,
“Just relax and let them grow.”
Red, yellow, and green
did not tell the whole story.
Now, five years later …
Warmth and light transform
dark sausage to bright flowers.
Magnolia opens.
Glow ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #367
Flowers first
when cherry trees wake.
Leaves later.
“Bracts” say botanists.
“Those red things are not petals.”
I just call them leaves.
Ah, such a cheery yellow graces the month of September. Alas, ragweed flowers out of sight at the same time, giving goldenrod a bad rep among some people with hay fever. While ragweed sheds pollen to the whims of the wind, goldenrod holds pollen that will be picked up and transported by insect pollinators. You’re not likely to inhale any goldenrod pollen unless a bee crawls up your nose.
From a distant sun,
some light finds another sun
and can shine again.
Glowing yellow like the sun,
spider waits for prey to come.
double or single
“Rose of Sharon” or “Althea”
sunny or cloudy
When they bloom,
each day is sunny.
Food’s good too.
Learn from the past and
be ready for the future.
Live in the present.
Choosing images to go with the lines of my aphoristic haiku was easy (for the past), serendipitous (for the present), and beset with false starts (for the future).
I remembered one of the photos I took among the ruins of ancient Greek temples at Paestum in the 1970-s. So stark, so sad, so in the past. Dwelling on the past would rot the mind. Learn from it and move on.
The future is fluid, unpredictable, possibly dystopian. Plan and prepare, but be ready to change plans if an unlikely future unfolds. (It will.) I wanted an image that was noncommital but not just blurry. After several false starts, I took a tight closeup of swirling brushwork in a small painting by an unknown artist, bought decades ago at a charity sale.
Wanting something joyful and ephemeral for the present, I culled some photos of flowering trees taken in 2020. One jumped out. The camera catches a bee hovering for a moment where it enhances a larger overall composition. The admonition to “be in the moment” is like the haiku’s final line and could be tweaked to give this post a title that winks at the final image.
Mellow Curmudgeon 