Flower Friday : : 'Tower of Jewels'

Another. version of echium is echium wildpretii. This one is growing next to the parking lot at Trail House where we met for our usual Friday morning gathering. These amazing blooms grow so tall that they begin to lean under their own weight. This one is close to 3 meters tall and seems to be echoing the line of the redwood trees behind it. 

These remind me of our next door neighbor, Bill, in Berkeley. He was a bit eccentric, possibly, I would hazard to guess, more than a little OCD. He knew it and had a sort of wry sense of humor about his compulsiveness. He was an architect and was singlehandedly remodeling a very old, very neglected brown shingle house. I use the past tense not because he is deceased, but because we have not seen or heard from him since I testified on his behalf in a complicated custody case eight years ago. He called to tell me that the case was decided in his favor and that is the last time I spoke to him.

He wasn't much of a gardener  but he did set out one summer to dig up all the dandelion plants which made up the main part of his small front lawn. He dug them out and put them in piles of ten so he could easily count how many he had removed. He must have had hundreds of them by the time he declared the project finito.


The other thing that came up unbidden in his garden was  echium. ( a different one from the 'Pride of Madera' version outside our bedroom door). It started one winter with one or two unassuming little green shrubs which slowly grew larger and eventually put up these enormously tall towers. He was quite charmed by them and kept them around, he said, for the bees. Since each of those little pink flowers is essentially a seed, they self-propagated until he had quite a forest of towers of jewels in front of his house.

He must have done something to prevent them from spreading, because, although our houses were quite close together, separated only by a driveway, we never had a single one come up in our garden.

The rural peace and quiet has been broken today only by the mowing that is, along with chain sawing tree cutting,  almost constant. Janet and Paul's house must be waiting for siding, and work on the fortress consisted of sanding the concrete foundations, raising clouds of concrete dust and then applying tar halfway up. Judging by the line of the tar, it looks like they will now backfill with the mound of dirt that has been moved up and down the hill more than once. I just hope they don't bring back the infernally beeping earth movers at 8am on the weekend to do it....Sleep eluded me last night and I hope I can catch up tonight....