Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #301 – Floral

Published on by Yinglan

Happy Sunday! I smiled when I saw this week’s theme for Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #301 – Floral – because I knew I would have some new photos to show and stories to tell. Thank you Sofia for hosting this week’s challenge and choosing this awesome theme!

I know, I know, I posted a photo of my personal meadow a few days ago but can I help it if I’m falling more and more in love with these Baby Blue Eyes wildflowers in my garden? More of them have started blooming in the last few days as bouts of cool weather set in. It’s so calming to look at them, don’t you think so?

It’s been unseasonably cool for the month of May. The temperature is usually in the range of 80-degrees-Fahrenheit (27-degrees-Celsius) right about now but instead, I found myself in long sweatpants, t-shirt, jacket, and wrapped in a blanket yesterday when the temperature never got above 60-degrees (15-degrees-Celsius).

Back to the meadow, I created this meadow for the pollinators and for my enjoyment. I can’t remember when and for what reason I began to develop an interest in flowers or seeing the beauty in flowers probably until I took my first picture of a flower.

Now, into my fourth season of gardening, I’m growing more flowers than the previous three seasons. Well, I did not grow most of them. Quite a bit are volunteers, like this chamomile, I grew chamomile in my Greenstalk planter last year and forgot to harvest the blooms. Long story short, the wind blew the seeds all over the place and chamomile is growing all over my back garden this year. I managed to dig a few volunteer plants and move them to empty spots.

Same with these violas, I cannot tell you how many hours I’ve spent pulling these seedlings out of the cracks between the rocks. I believe it will slow down as we head into summer because these don’t do well in hot weather.

Finally, I think my garden is having its most prolific year yet. All the plants feel full of energy, like a young child. I have 3 peony plants and there are so many blooms on them this year that it’s making me wonder whether I need to create a makeshift trellis for them to lean on before they flop over and create a mess, or worse break a stem.

27 thoughts on “Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #301 – Floral”

  5. It’s really lovely to see how you love your garden. I live in a village so I get to see a lot of wild flowers blooming, and me and my family plant crops, but we also have a small garden with some flowers. Plants are beautiful and useful, they keep us alive in the bottom line.

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    1. It’s great to hear you also have a small garden. Gardens are lovely, aren’t they? I’ve been adding more herbs this year because I feel herbs are sometimes more useful than flowers. I agree, plants do keep us alive – mentally and physically.

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      1. Yeah, gardens are nice. We also have some herbs in our garden, along with flowers. And yeah, plant do keep us alive, not just as, but all other animals as well. The entire ecosystem rests upon them. We should be thankful for that and treat them with respect. I have a couple of friends who are doing eco farming, their field looks amazing and the food is incomparably better than the one you buy in shops. I, on the other hand, use pesticides on my crops, but try to minimize it. How do you grow your crops?

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      2. I don’t use use pesticides on the edibles. I only use those on ornamentals and fruit trees but only before the fruit has matured. I grow my crops mostly in raised beds. I also plant in large grow bags and stackable planters but I mostly reserve those for shallow rooted crops.

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      3. So you manage to grow them properly, without the use of pesticides? That’s great! But I guess it would be different if you grew big amounts of edibles on a big piece of land. And stackable planters are awesome!

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      4. Haha, I don’t have a large plot of land at all. I grow intensively, meaning I try to cram as much as I can per square foot of space , which can be more prone to pests. Instead of pesticides, I use netting to keep pests out. I’ve only started using netting this year after the cabbage moths decimated my brassicas last year.

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  7. Lovely! It’s so funny that I had a pot with some violas in it last year. This year, I found them popping up in different places – all outside of that pot! (Not many though 🙁).

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    1. I’m glad there wasn’t many of those violas popping up. I’ve been picking violas seedlings in my front yard since January and it’s just barely begin to slow down.

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