Having only been inside the house and supermarkets yesterday, today I set forth on a walk. I wanted to see if the wild purple iris were still in bloom, since I'd wanted to dig up some for my step-mother this year. I set off for a little wild hillside a few blocks east of my house -- not a park, but better, as the public doesn't even know it's allowed there. As expected, the corner by the Unitarian Church had a greater variety of wildflowers: the usual purple vetch and the tiny yellow kind, the camas whose bulbs used to feed the Kalapuya people, pink Oregon mallow and purple-clustered brodiaea, and to my delight, a few cat's ears (
calochortus), little cream-colored lilies whose interiors do look just like the fuzzy insides of the ears of a cat.
Onward to the hill. Through the meadow, then the white and black oaks, and up among the douglas firs and occasional smooth-trunked madrones. Everywhere, glossy attractive leaves of poison oak promised to punish the ignorant and inattentive, but I think I was neither. At the top is a lovely, druidy spot with moss-covered stones arranged nearly in a semi-circle, a nice place to rest. After a bit, I wandered further east and watched some robin-liked birds with white spots, which turned out (when I got home and looked them up) to be rufous-sided towhees. They were eating berries from some small tree, then escaping first up an alder and then into a great blackberry thicket. At this point, a meadowlark teased me by calling out three times, then falling silent before I could find it. I then backtracked around to the meadow-covered south slope, which was gorgeous, with the purple vetch all throughout the tall grass, along with some simple, pale blue flower. No iris, though.
Cat's ear, hilltop, and south slope:
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