Blog – Page 203 – Ellis Hollow

Bees on Iris reticulata

The rest of that patch of Iris reticulata (that I misidentified yesterday) opened up by the time I got home from work yesterday. The honeybees were working them over pretty good. They fit perfectly in the tubular flowers, and spend what seems like forever in there when you’re holding a camera waiting for them to emerge.

Floral foreplay

If you enjoy the bud as much as the flower, the emergence as much as fruition, then you extend the ‘season of interest’ of every plant you grow. (Click on images for a larger view.)

Blanched sedums:

Clockwise: Emerging eranthis, hellbore bud, emerging hellebore stems, another hellbore bud.

Something I don’t even remember planting coming up around cyclamen.

As the snow retreats (again)

The first day of spring dawned at 4 F. Â But since then, it’s been in the 50s and 60s and most of the snow has retreated again — except for the drifts in the veggie garden and some of the piles along the driveway and in the ditches. There’s a lot more to see than there was two weeks ago when the snow retreated the first time.

Crocuses are peaking where the soil is warmest. (Click on images for larger view.)

What else is flowering? Clockwise, an orange crocus, an iris (cristata?), the now trite clump of snowdrops (still my favorite spring ephemeral), and a nice spotted hellebore flower.

Politics and the English Language

Good advice from George Orwell in his Politics and the English Language first published in 1946:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Sunday music: Water Song, Jorma Kaukonen w/ David Bromberg:

The stream out back runs (sometimes it only crawls) year-round. But it was gurgling today. Not exactly like the babbling brook of a song Jorma performs here. Still enough to be heard over the crows building a nest in the pines and the geese marking territory in the wetland.

I saw Jorma at SUNY Binghamton (as it was known then) in high school when he was playing with Hot Tuna. (Accounts for some of my hearing loss.) Bromberg and his band opened.