Thursday 13: The mostly begone flowers of my life... A Bittersweet Journey.

 I was spinning through the photos one day last month, and decided that there weren't enough flowers in the blogasphere, so here are a few from my life.  I hope you like this little "Rose Parade".  

I've finally found two paths to getting photos, the originals and the doctored ones made into Headers for this blog.  I'm soooo happy.  I thought the New Blogger had blown away the connection to google photos, but happily, it still exists.

1. Trescony Gardens Gladiolus Bloom stalk.  It is the palest of pink that fades to white.

 

2. Common Dandelions from somewhere .. It has it's own day on the calendar, does the Dandelion.

3. This is the back yard Cape Honeysuckle That I used a little program on to make it look like a painting.  I don't think the program even exists anymore.  More's the pity, as it was an excellent one.

4.Dalia blossoms from the Santa Cruz farmer's market one year.  As you can see, I made a header out of this.

5. My once plentiful bearded iris are no more.  The Tortoises ate them all up.  I'd never get another tortoise.  They are so destructive in a garden and they can climb a two foot wall of bricks.  Rock walls?  No problem at all.

6.  A favorite and nostalgic flowering plant.  It came from a cutting of my mother's plant.

7.This Orchid is a beauty.  It lived for quite awhile but Orchids are tough if you don't have a special room for them. 

8.This rose is very old, planted in the late 70's, It is still going strong.  It's called Sunflare,  and I love it.

9. A Gorgeous little bi-color Carnation from a farmer's market bouquet.  Hubby used to bring me flowers every week from the farmer's market.  I miss them but these are trying times.  Must not be crabby.

 

10.Another Dahlia, I think, from a farmer's market bouquet.  But, they could actually be Mums.  The pink flower just below it in the shadows is a Gazania, and it was named after the 15th-century Greek-Italian scholar Theodorus of Gaza. 

 

11. My sweet and tiny pink Day lilies of bygone times.  I wasn't able to go into the garden for over a year, and the tortoises knocked down the chicken wire ring that I put up around my little plants and ate them all up.

12.  Another beautiful Bouquet, one of the ones sent to my daughter in Santa Cruz. 

13. Last but not least, The Scarlet Pimpernel that grows in spring and flowers in time to help the itty bitty Sooty Foot butterflies make it another year.  They use this and the Oxolis flowers to sustain themselves.  At one and a quarter inch wingspan, aren't much bigger than a housefly.  They are Jet black! They are unbelievably tiny.