Wildflowers

The wildflowers are blooming on M Hill.  That's what a friend tells me.  So I scramble over rocks and up dry stream beds.  I have a camera around my neck and a toddler on my back -- a bit ambitious perhaps, but how else will I see these seasonal beauties?

From the parking lot I start along a forested trail, but it doesn't take long to climb up from the fir canopy into meadows of moss, punctuated by outcroppings of bare bedrock.

There's little soil here, so trees grow small.  Arbutus, twisted and red, was the first coastal tree that I learned to identify.  Garry Oak are less showy, but utterly unique to this region.  These trees are survivors.  Stunted and gnarly, they look it.

But it's the flowers I came to see.  They're subtle, small enough to be missed.  

 

Fawn Flower.  Shooting Star.  Satin Flower.  They sprout from the shallowest of earth and fling their fragile hearts open to the spring blusters.  What brave souls.

I lean over a rock, sprawl on the damp ground, contort myself around a shrub to meet them.  They drip dew and quietly conjure the sun out from behind the clouds.  Hello spring.


Linking, for the last time this season, to Sunlit Sunday at My Little Home and Garden.  Thank you for hosting, Karen.