Late May Flowers (No Pilgrims)

Columbines. I love 'em, wild and tame. This one is Aquilegia canadensis, which grows wild in Michigan and has reseeded itself next to our house for the last decade or so.

Many moons ago, my husband, before we were married, bought a tiny little house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the back was a tiny garden CRAMMED with flowering plants and trees. It had two peach trees, a pear tree, and a plum tree; globe thistles, peonies, hyacinths, tulips, and daffodils; exuberant orange poppies, thornless and thorny roses, and fall-blooming crocus.

And scads of columbines.

For a new horticulture graduate, it was an unbelievable playground. I weeded back there and gardened and dug.

And when we ended up moving and selling the place, I had written right into the agreement that I retained rights to the perennials. I had a list two pages long of all the flowers and things we were coming back for and where they were growing.

This is about all I got done yesterday. I went out and took columbine photos, squished the larvae of the evil columbine sawfly, came indoors and -- had a migraine.

That was a waste of a 77-degree (25 C) day! Today it's only supposed to hit the upper 50s and it's already 51 (11 C), and tonight they are warning of widespread frost and lows below freezing. Brrr.

I did get the lower half of a pear knitted this weekend, but it doesn't look like much yet.

So now that I'm not looking at the sparkly phosphene-like patterning of a migraine aura or feeling like I have an icepick stuck in my eyebrow, I think I'll go knit.

Oh. This is the flower of one of our two paw paw trees, Asimina triloba, the only member of the custard-apple family that grows in Michigan. We have two trees so that theoretically they could cross-pollinate (they won't self-pollinate), but #2 stubbornly refuses to flower. It'll fling up root-sprouts all around it, but not one peculiar-looking little flower. Hmmph!