Lupines!

[jhetley]

Just back (well, back and shower and lunch and...) from the sacred Sunday bike ride, 40 miles out around a local lake. Bugs and birds and beasts and things, but the primary feature was wildflowers. Lupines, both purple and pink, blue flags in the marshy areas, buttercups, yellow and orange hawkweed, the last of the rhodora back in the swamps, lots of other things I couldn't identify while whizzing along on the road.

And nobody tried to kill me. Made my day. Lots of roadside casualties, though. If you want to feed your family on roadkill, Maine's the place.

Installed a window air-conditioner yesterday, first time, we're getting soft with advancing age. So the weather will remain cool for the forseeable future. New Englanders who like cool summers can thank me. If you want hot and sticky, on the other hand, you can damned well move south.

Comments

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

blue flags in the marshy areas

I automatically translated this into blue iris, since the terms were interchangeable where I grew up: is this accurate, or did you actually mean flags?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

>>I automatically translated this into blue iris,

Yes. "Blue flag" is the wild version of the cultivated iris. Smaller flowers, none of the fancy colors or ruffles and "beards." They grow in wet fields around here -- out at the nature center where my wife holds sway, you can trace the drainage pattern from the frog pond by the blue flags in the field.

[persimmon.livejournal.com]

Odd coincidence - yesterday I was watching a show about bog gardens, and he was planting iris on the margins, though he didn't call them flags. Is it possible they are called flags because they mark the wetter parts of the fields?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I don't know -- plant common names are funny things, and "flag" could easily be a corruption of some other word in Swedish or Swahili. I'll ask The Naturalist and get back to you if she has any speculations.