Flower Salvage

I was at a local apple and pumpkin and cider stand recently, and they had a rack of sad-looking bedding plants greatly marked down; some perennials, some annuals.  Some had already clearly been affected by a hard frost.  I figured, for only a couple bucks, I’d take a chance on a yarrow with silvery foliage, and also something missing its tag that seems to be in the dianthus/carnation family.  When I got to the cash register, they threw them in for free!

The dianthus is inside, but the yarrow is outside since I thought I’d try to plant it next to our heated garage before the weather changed.  Or not; perhaps it will come inside too until the spring.  In the meantime, it’s an unexpected late fall bloom as I go in and out of our door.

This weekend’s weather is predicted to be unseasonably mild and even sunshiney one day.  Time to get out in the garden one last time!

Mystery Flower for Eye Candy Friday

I was in Madison, Wisconsin, for a meeting earlier this week. It was one of the last nice days of the fall, I suspect. At lunchtime, I went for a walk by Lake Mendota and found this flower which I’m not familiar with, which was still braving the end-of-October chilly weather.

Whatever it is, it’s lovely!  And very purple-pink.

Last Rose of the Year

Right before our 8 degrees below freezing night, a couple weeks ago.

Last Rose of Fall

Sigh.  It’s a long time before the earliest late March or early April bulbs bloom…

Painted Eye Candy

The Painted Daisies always make me think of early fall, though they’re supposed to be a midsummer flower, I read.  They’re almost done now and we’re finally just getting what I think of fall weather in the last week or two.

I asked my 11-year-old Gothlet to help me pick one of several Painted Daisy pics for the blog post, and she picked the most wild one, with daisy petals going every which way.   I should have known.  I was explaining ‘Dungeons and Dragons‘ to her the other day, and she immediately decided that if she were a character, she would either be ‘chaotic evil’ or ‘chaotic neutral’.  Probably the former….

So, here are your chaotic painted daisies for the day!  (I won’t speculate as to their alignment.)  Click if you want to see the details of how they are, as Lisa would remind me, ‘composite flowers’.

Raindrops on Roses Eye Candy Friday

A picture from a week and a half ago, in Washington DC.

Yes, I was in DC again for the second time this year, after not being there in 30 years.

Yes, it rained!

I’ll tell you all about it, but the recovery from swine flu at my house has me a little behind….

Dogwood Days

I was gone almost all of last week, hence the blog blackout.  (And gone a long weekend before that.  I’ll catch up sometime in this lifetime!)

Here’s what I was seeing last week about this time:

Flowering dogwood, at Gettysburg National Cemetery.

A beautiful tree which is apparently not hardy up here.  But was in full bloom all over Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington DC.

Not so beautiful was the woman on the other side of the camera, who had just spent 24 hours straight on a bus at the time that she got off and took these pictures.

Please to have my mental status examined if I ever volunteer to chaperone a busful of 5th graders on a cross-country bus trip again, eh?

But the dogwood was lovely!

Real Flowers from Sock Camp this time

Not that last Friday’s flower were fake!  But these flowers really ARE from Sock Camp, not just posted from Sock Camp.  Flowers on a shrub planted at the Inn at Port Ludlow.  This was the first morning.  And then it was cloudy and rainy until the last day.

But hey, that’s good knitting weather!

This is a mystery flower to me (which probably only means it’s not hardy here, that’s all — like so many things that don’t like -20 F temperatures!).  But they were beautiful and fragrant, too.

Just got back a few days ago, and it’s been crazy at work and home, and there are church obligations now too.

And tomorrow we leave for Chicago (after I work).

But I’m taking my laptop with me:  I hope to catch you up with more of Sock Camp (and the train ride) than flowers soon!

Flowers from Sock Camp

Last week, I went from a week at work where it seemed that every day only got busier and busier, directly to the train station to take the Empire Builder train to BMFA Sock Camp, where I just arrived today.  There was no internet access on the train, so this is my first chance to catch up.  Thus, I have a number of color studies still in my camera and locked in my home computer.  Sigh.  

Well, I essentially did a color study last year for a reason unrelated to color (one of my posts for the ABC-Along).  And since these colors are pretty much non-existent in nature back home this time of year (though they do exist here in the Pacific Northwest!),  I can’t take these photographs right now.

So I present to you with the aid of a blast from the past:  Bright and light colors!

The Colors of Flowers.

All these are flower photographs I took from flowers in my own garden, within the last two years.  My garden is somewhat random, not planned around much of anything other than easy care, frankly.  And blooming time: I try to have something blooming most of the time during the all-too-brief Midwestern growing season.  So it is interesting to me that so many of the flowers are warm colors: yellows, oranges, pinks.  Because when I pick out yarn, or clothes, these are not necessarily the colors I’m drawn to at all, other than red, which I do like very much in anything.

But this collage still makes me very happy inside, just to look at it.  

Especially in March of the winter that wouldn’t end!

Eye Candy Friday from the Streets of Tacoma

One last look back.

This primrose was actually growing OUTSIDE on the night of February 13th on the streets of downtown Tacoma.  Not even in a container that could be taken inside, or anything.  Right out there in the dirt! 

Can you believe it?

Well, spring will come here eventually too.  At least, that’s what they tell me.  Once the snow that fell yesterday and the ice that’s under it melts, and the single-digit lows warm up, and it gets above freezing again….

Subzero Eye Candy Friday

Last summer’s weeds don’t care what the temperature is.

(They’re dead, after all, I suppose.)

It was colder this morning than yesterday, with more wind; -24 F when I left for work, with a -45 wind chill.  But today it got up to 2!  25 degrees F in 8 hours!  The beginning of the end of the deep freeze — for now.