More Glories (who could resist?)

The morning glory was so surpassingly beautiful that I found myself photographing it whenever Bill and I were on the deck birding. This photo is soft, due to rain and low light, but it's the only one that seems to capture its unbelievable shade of sky blue.


The compositional possibilities of heart-shaped leaves and saucer blossoms were intriguing.

I think I loved it best in the rain, because the colors were truer, and the blossoms lasted all day, sometimes even into the next morning, before shriveling into pinky purple balloons and disappearing.

But oh, when the sun came out, the bud and petiole shadows played across the flowers' canvas.
And the light came through their gossamer tissue, never the same blue from day to day or moment to moment, always going through the spectrum of blue to lavender
and Wilhelm Langguth and Bolton and Grey Sprite seemed so happy to be blooming alongside this miraculous plant.

One day Bill saw a bumblebee go in a flower and he grabbed my camerajust in time to see the bee tumble out, the way bees do, which is why they're called bumblebees--because they're so heavy-bodied they are a bit clumsy. But they seem to do fine anyway. They aren't aware that by human calculations, the physics of their wing loading actually contraindicate their becoming airborne. So they fly.

these two by Bill of the Birds


Chet loved them, too.

Morning Glories

This was the view out our raised deck sliders all summer. Oh, I miss it so. When you can have color like this for practically nothing, why wouldn't you have a few planters out every window? We do!

This spring, I planted eight seeds in a little plastic eight-pack. Four were moonflowers, and four were Morning Glories, "Heavenly Blue" variety. They all came up, but the moonflowers never were able to shed their seed coats; the cotyledons rotted inside. The same thing happened to three of the morning glories. It was too darn wet for them, raining and raining, and morning glories and moonflowers hate wet feet. But the fourth morning glory survived, and when it got its first true leaf I planted that little plant down below our deck and watered it now and then.

It writhed around on the ground for awhile, throwing out tendrils, and then took a hint in the form of a trellis and began twining up, up, up.

The kids really didn't notice it until it started peeking up over the deck railing. At about that time it started blooming from the bottom up.

And Phoebe and Liam would go out every morning and count the blossoms. One, five, eight, 17, too many to count. They'd run back in with today's count. I miss that, too, now that they're getting up in the dark to go to school. We would go out into the back yard by Liam's willow just to gaze on it, this tower of flowers.
All from a single seed.

Plants give us so much, if we let them into our world.