The last ray of sunset feels even more precious when you can sense autumn waiting in the shadows.
Beautiful Evening
Category: Ditch Flowers
Pokeweed
Folks, this plant (pokeweed, or Phytolacca americana) looks like Dr. Seuss’s fever dream and I love it! The colors alone make them stand out in the ditches right now and it is so worth stopping to take a closer look. I took some cuttings of […]
An Education in Water Lilies
I spent some time with water lilies in August and it was a far different experience than photographing forest plants or wild weeds in ditches. In my mind, lilies had been the stuff of Monet; pastel, subdued, domestic, a little blurry. Nope. Nothing of the […]
The Green Season Paradox
So I spent the winter thinking about the photos I wanted to make when spring came. The good news is that I made a lot of those photos! But then came summertime busy-ness and very few of them have been shared. So here — belatedly […]
Wondrous Frost
The new year began with a few days of hoarfrost, and the morning of January 3 in particular was just glorious — delicate, icy sculpture that fringed the trees and grasses, and sparkled like treasure when sunlight finally reached it. Every leaf became art in […]
Humble Jewels
Proof that the common can be sublime! Coral berries and goldenrod grow just about everywhere in southwest Iowa, but this patch turned into something special when it was wrapped in hoarfrost and sunlight.
Of All the Gall …
One plant’s misfortune is one photographer’s joy: this is a gall on a goldenrod plant, the result of an insect doing something to annoy and disrupt the plant, which responded by forming a growth around the disruption. When I took this photo, I didn’t know […]
Beguiled by Bittersweet
One thing that didn’t end with autumn? Photos of bittersweet. Folks, sprinkle a little snow on the ditches and I just can’t help myself! A little clutch of scarlet berries winks at me when I’m driving along a country road and before I know it, […]
November’s Bittersweet
Bittersweet is just beautiful in November, especially at sunrise and sunset — its brilliant orange berries almost glow in that delicate light! It also looks nice inside; my mom and I harvested the ditches a few weekends ago, cutting some sprigs of bittersweet for winter […]
A Story and Morning Glory
While reminiscing with my mom over stories of their shared childhood adventures, my aunt Beverly recently brought up her memories of summer hours spent hacking down climbing morning glory vines in the family’s cornfield. Maybe a little surprisingly, Beverly remembered morning glory duty fondly and […]