(This is a piece from my old nature journal. It goes nearly
ten years back to a June afternoon when the Ridgeline Trail near our Castle
Rock home was brand new, an area we had begun exploring well before the trails had
been cut.)
~~~
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| Ridgeline Trail |
We never anticipated so many.
Gail and I hit Ridgeline Trail today outfitted with gear we
had not hiked with there before: a spiral notepad and pen. In the days prior we
had noticed an incredible profusion of spring wildflowers in bloom, observing ones
newly-opened almost daily. Finally, yesterday, we mused that we should bring
paper and pen sometime soon and record how many we see. “There must be twenty-five
or thirty,” one of us said. So today we gave ourselves extra time for our
regular three-mile loop, and started recording from the moment we left the
trailhead. Astonishingly, we had not even gotten off the feeder path before we
had already surpassed our imagined number.
 |
| Prairie Smoke, one of our favorites |
It was quite stunning, a magnificent diversity. In that
small distance we counted eighty-four different blooming wildflowers! Eighty-four!
And this was a conservative count, especially because we had not the patience
this time around to differentiate all the varieties of vetches (at least four) and the plethora of penstemons (at least six); no doubt there were more of these
ubiquitous species. Additionally, this count included only those plants near
the trail, and only those in bloom – it omitted those more than several yards off
the path, as well as tiny groundcovers we may not have seen and those in leaf or bud but not bloom. All
told, there would have been far more.
Thirty of the eighty-four blooming species were
shades of yellow, with nineteen purple and
eighteen white; those remaining were various
hues of pink, orange, blue and coral…
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| Hummingbird moth sipping Thistle |
Gail is the wildflower expert between us. (I’m more the
tree, rock and sky guy.) She has an uncanny knack for name recall of plants she
even rarely sees. “Don’t you remember when we saw this one once several years
ago at blobbity-wherezit?” So she ends up having to school me each year even in
some common ones I always seem to need to relearn. Even still, many of the
names escaped us both (an effort for another day), so those we could not ID we recorded
by color, character and leaf shape, so as not to duplicate. Some were so odd as
to almost defy description – fern-like,
butterfly-shaped, spidery, fringed-clusters,
 |
| Paintbrush, Penstemon and Pikes Peak |
asparagus-leaved. And yet
others were so common-looking or plain-seeming that we have very likely
overlooked them typically – dandelion-like,
dandelion-like B, and dandelion-like C. Thirty of the eighty-four blooming
species were shades of yellow, interestingly, with nineteen purple and eighteen
white; those remaining were various tints of pink, orange, blue and coral. Many
species there were that have also been cultivated: wild roses, geraniums,
orchids, yarrows, asters, alyssums, clovers, forget-me-nots, daisies, alfalfas,
lupines, sunflowers, spiderwort, potentillas, yuccas, sweet peas, larkspurs,
wallflowers, paintbrushes, flaxes and phloxes. There were even wild onions,
plums, currants and cherries. But those undomesticated, at least to our
knowledge, were also well-represented: arnicas, mallows, other worts,
harebells, fairy trumpets, dogbanes, thistles, prairie smoke, holly, knapweeds,
prickly poppy, banner flower, cacti, and who-knows-what-else. Yet there they all
were, every one of them in their created glory.
 |
| Mariposa Lily, another favorite |
Hmmm… Glory... That’s what it was, inestimable beauty, even
regal, exceeding the splendor of a king.
Jesus said, “Consider
the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell
you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. If God so
clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown
into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, you of so little faith?” (Matthew
6:28-30)
Oh, the depth of the
riches… of God! How… unfathomable are His ways! (Romans 11:33)
The grass withers, the
flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. (Isaiah 40:7)
~~ RGM, from an early
journal entry,
Adapted for my blog May
22, 2016
