For #40DaysOfGoodShit days 5-7, I’ve been noticing flowers.
According to the PictureThis app on my phone and Pl@ntNet on the web, this is dead nettle. Looks pretty lively to me.
The lawns in my new neighborhood are full of the stuff. This makes me very happy – these large clumps of low-lying flowers coming up as a sign of spring. I’m sure plenty of people would define these as weeds and perhaps a sign that the builders of the development cheaped out when laying the sod, but I was pretty glad to see these purple eruptions instead of just watching brown lawns slowly turning green.
I just like this shot because I feel like it gives the scale of the flora better.
And then the very next day this happened.
At the same time that I am done with this winter, something about the variability we’re getting this year feels like home to my Washingtonian heart. If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.
Berea College has a pretty public commitment to trying to keep its grounds resilient and biodiverse (while also tidy and safe). So it was unexpected but not surprising to discover that the lawns are full of springbeauty.
This doesn’t begin to get the scope of it. There’s literally blocks of the stuff. Like the dead nettle, it’s lovely to see that everything doesn’t have to be just so.
Also, according to Pl@ntNet, springbeauty is formally known as Claytonia virginica, which sounds to me like a magnificent character name. “Claytonia Virginica Walsh sipped her tea, looked at the baseball sitting just inside her fence, and tried to decide which child would be brave enough to open the gate and retrieve it. It looked like the older boys were going to make the little squirrelly one do it.”
*It’s conceivable that’s Claytonia caroliniana, but that’s not nearly as good a character name. I suppose Claytonia Caroline, who goes by Cat, could be a detective in a cozy mystery series, but I’m not impressed.
There is so much to be said for wildflower lawns, if people are willing to forgo the suburban norm of faux gold greens. On the 16 acre path of land my wife and i live we have let most of the grass grow wild, uncut, with each year more wildflowers coming in, and mostly (but not all) weeds forced out.
And on a smaller scale, when I lived in north central Arizona, the spring brought a tiny little surprise of a purple flower that came from what looked like grass. I learned it was grape hyacinth, and it would root literally in the gravel of my driveway.
I support the wild lawns everywhere, down with golf grass!
Amen! More appreciation of wildflower lawns. And I adore grape hyacinth.
There was one year when we mowed only paths through our 2 acres in Ohio for a couple months (until the village government took notice and told us to get to it). It was amazing both to see some of the wildflowers which took root among the grasses, and how many more and different birds we were seeing!
Oh those villages ________s! Not to mention the effect of drawing more bees and the rest of Emily Dickinson’s recipe for prairie.