Tiny Tuesday : : California Poppy

A few days too late for the May Macro Madness finale, I was nonetheless fascinated by Walking Wombat's pictures from finalists and vowing to try the Tiny Tuesday challenge, spent the day in the garden dodging the guys mowing the tinder dry grass in the field and pulling out a very invasive prickly, nasty ground cover. 

With a newly discovered macro setting on my camera, I began by taking several dozen pictures of the passiflora blossoms, which never cease to fascinate me, but a search of the Blipfoto archives revealed hundreds of excellent shots by other blippers, no doubt equally fascinated, including one of my own, so I moved on.

I'm sure Pedro's' father,  toiling away under the canna lilies to remove the stubborn ground cover, thought I was a madwoman as I took shot after shot of the seductive Passiflora and its twirling tendrils. I felt like a dilettante. I finally settled on the California poppies because of their cheerful and somewhat ephemeral presence in the garden. None of them were planted by us, but since the opportunists seem to do better than the ones we toil over, we leave them.

It is said that the ships sailing into the San Francisco Bay sighted the East Bay Hills covered with these poppies and gave the entrance and later the newly constructed bridge the name of "Golden Gate".