Flowers in Bloom

The season has had a bizarre feel to it.  Perhaps it is that we are in the seventeen year cycle of the cicada and so everywhere one steps, one finds a cicada or it's older skeleton self.  Maybe it is just the constant cicada hum in the air.  Perhaps it is the likely chance of encountering the slithering snake, which I have encountered more this year than in my entire life.  Perhaps due to the fact that we have entered the year of the water snake, perhaps because I am terrified of snakes, perhaps because snakes represent transformation and something is afoot. 

Within all of this strangeness, comes the clarity and explosion of flowers.  Embracing a flower deeply, inhaling it's fragrance, it's softness, it's velvet skin, the oddities evaporate.

I took some photographs of a few of the flowers in bloom.  I have to say that I went wild this season photographing peonies and included a few of them here.  I simply can not get enough of them.  I think in an attempt to possess the flower's beauty.  It's beauty is so immense I think one more photograph will make it more mine, more a part of me, more of a real experience.   Well whatever the case may be, I have enjoyed stalking the peony and will continue to do so.  I also experimented with about 60 stems, cooling them off when they were a bit past budded and will see if we can delay their bloom by a month.   

After walking quickly into the house as I had encountered an enormous rat snake in the garden, this snake was slithering with frightening skill up the porch beams.  Really! on my home.  Come on now.  You can see it's tail goes all the way up to the top left edge of the photograph.  

The Allium.  The first year we removed bulb after bulb from the garden of these alliums.  They were all over about half an acre, here and there.  Not until this year they bloomed.  Such a surprise!

It was Zach's birthday and one of our new lovely crew members, Allyson gave me a delicious carrot cake recipe.  Our friend Meg decorated it with me covering it in chamomile and bowles black violas.  

 

the fairy-like of all flowers: nigella, chervil and salad burnet.

a bird's paradise

The garden in bloom.  White clover abounds.  Kale throwing up it's flowers in yellow! Surrounded by the tight and perhaps slightly serious lettuce. 

Tomorrow those kales will be gone, so I wanted to send them out with a mention.

chamomile and chives

chamomile just harvested to be dried for tea

The Peony.

 and the sweet blooms begin.

As the rain came pouring through last night many peonies ravaged about.  

Stunning in their power, thrown down to the earth.

A flower seemingly too regal for such a display.

Maybe it will allow each of us in our own need to be perfect, 

to fall about and to really let it hang all out.