Wild Iris ~ Brazoria County, Texas
To paraphrase a line from poet Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” ~
Should not our reach exceed our grasp?
Or what’s a season for?
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Lagniappe 
Something got my 4 speckled eggs. I checked yesterday and the nest is empty. I’m heartbroken.
I’m so sorry. We all know it happens, but it still is distressing to see the evidence. Perhaps the pair will try again. I’ve read that many species will do that if a first attempt fails — just as some naturally produce more than one brood each year.
“Reach” does the job well. Another pithy verb, “rise,” lends itself to the alternate title “My Wild Iris Rose.”
Oh, my gosh. That’s hilarious! I’m not sure you’ve ever packed such a variety of word play into a single phrase.
It just came to me. You could say I was overcome.
Oh, yes indeed! So very beautiful.
I think the details of iris blooms are so elegant. Some of them are a little overblown for me, but our natives are simpler, and such a pleasure to see.
My reach has always exceeded my grasp. Wonderful, wonderful close-up.
This ‘one’ was beautiful, but from the number of leaves that filled the ditches around it, there may be quite an abundance of them this year. Being there at the right time to see them is the trick. I have come to appreciate the little details I never saw in the past: a closer look always is rewarding.
Sure is!
On its slender stalk, the iris reaching upward, outward – is a perfect image representative of Spring.
I tend to think the iris, indeed, all the Spring flowers, actually do grasp that for which they reach.
Our attention.
Another lovely photograph.
It wasn’t until I became interested in our native plants that I realized how many of our spring flowers belong to the iris family. There’s ‘the iris,’ of course, but blue-eyed grass, purple pleat-leaf, prairie nymph, and prairie celestials also are included. They’re all notable for their early rising and the beauty of their details: they certainly do catch my attention.
I love the dewy sparkle.
It’s pretty, isn’t it? Being able to see details that evade a quick glance is such a wonderful benefit of a macro lens.
Yep, Spring has sprung. No wild iris around here that I know of but all the nest cams are busy. I’m watching a bald eagle (Mum? Dad?) feeding lunch to their newly hatched chicks.
Sushi, anyone?
The Mississippi Flyway cam is hopping with white pelicans.
On Thursday, the last of our white pelicans appear to have taken off. I saw about thirty of them circling in the sky, as they’re wont to do just before heading off to the north. Sure enough, when I looked Friday at the pilings where they like to perch, one pelican per piling, none was in sight. Their rising and departing is a sign of spring, too.
HaHa! This one really does look like it’s “reaching for Spring”!! Great snap, Linda.
After I’d already posted, I took another look at the photo and thought it looked a bit like cartoon depictions of a sleepwalker — but “Sleepwalking Into Spring” doesn’t quite make it as a title, despite the alliteration.
Irises already blooming! Lovely!
You should see the spread of those sword-like leaves down at San Bernard. If even half of the plants put forth blooms, it will be quite a show.
I think from now on I’m going to save up several weeks’ worth of your posts & read them all at once. That happened inadvertently this time, but I thoroughly enjoyed having so many in a row to read. The downside is you only get one comment. Ha!
Because you’re slightly ahead of us, spring-wise, it’s like a glimpse of a not-too-far-away future to read your posts. Thank you for sharing Texas with us!
Given what I found this weekend, spring surely is barreling toward you. There’s been an explosion of blooms around here — even some of the roadsides are covered now, at least in sections, and it’s beautiful. I’ve been noticing really green trees, too — it’s happy-making, for sure!
I absolutely love this side view. It does such a great job showing those lovely details in the “hairs”. My father and I went for a hike this morning and noticed some of the very early and tiny spring wildflowers of this area. There were a few blooming, and others with flowers just appearing. Not many yet, but they are beginning. And what excited me was when I found a small green tip just emerging from the ground where we found a cluster of pink lady’s slippers blooming last season, so I’m hopeful we’ll see more this season. Unfortunately, that area took a lot of damage during a very heavy snowfall and lots of wind storms we’ve had this year. The entire park was closed for weeks while they cleared both the road and the trails. So much of the softwood evergreens were destroyed by the weight of the snow, either snapped and fallen, permanently bent horizontal, or cut down because they were blocking trails/roads. Terrible to see. But hopefully it will give us the opportunity to see how resilient nature can be in the coming years.
I had hoped to get to east Texas to see/search for lady’s slippers this year, but I think I’m already too late. No matter; I’ll have yours to enjoy. I did have a recent experience of going back to a site that provided some unusual flowers last year, and sure enough, they’d produced again. It’s slightly amusing that they’re around a vacant house on a vacant lot in a town only ten miles or so away. If the house isn’t torn down and the land sold, I’m assuming they’ll be there next year. What’s interesting is that the lot was closely mowed earlier this year, but the flowers didn’t care.
Your comment about the closed park reminded me of what happened at the Brazoria refuge after our last hurricane. There were roads closed there while they cleaned up, as well as a lot of mowing, waterway cleaning, and burning. I’m not sure how many of the flowers I’ve always found there will recover for this season — nothing to do but wait!
Nice different take on the iris. It’s lovely to see such soft color as we look at sticks and mud still. Only a few days to go until dandelion dress up the yard.
Our native Texas ‘dandelions’ have just exploded in past days, as has a pretty purple vetch. I found one area this weekend where the roads were lined with a pretty combination of vetch, Indian paintbrush, and fleabane. Bluebonnets are great, but there are plenty of other flowers to brighten up our spring.
Oh, seeing this puts me back in Louisiana, sitting on the shaded side of the house and painting/studying the Louisiana Iris — even the curled and spent blossoms were lovely.
I loved working from life – just prepping the watercolors and working straight from my close-up view, washing in the color, allowing stronger ones to float and blend, then just before it was dry, to add those fine details — ah, the comfort that process gave me!
Thanks for giving me an easy return – via the comfort of home and the internet!
Your comment brought to mind the number of artists I’ve found working en plein air: a fellow in the middle of the open range in Kansas, one in our flower-rich Galveston cemeteries, another on a point of land in a Texas mid-coast refuge. I’ve sometimes thought that the experience of just being there and painting would be exceedingly pleasurable, however ‘good’ the result. It takes far more time to paint a scene than to snap it with a cell phone camera, and that time allows a different sort of relationship to develop with the subject.
If I ever were to paint, watercolor would be my choice. I don’t know why, exactly; it seems magical in a way oils and acrylics don’t — at least, to me.
That looks suspiciously like an iris of some sort, which I’m always up for.
It is an iris. I added some tags for ‘Texas blue flag’ and ‘Iris viginica‘. I’m trying to remember to add tags with common and scientific names when I don’t make a point of it in the text. I checked out the biggest stand of them that I know of last weekend, and they mostly were still in bud — but there were a lot of them.
Delightful little creature.xxx
There’s nothing like a profile view to provide a bit of a surprise!
Lovely photo. One thing about only seeing your posts in a group is being immersed in beauty.
I enjoy finding different ways to photograph familiar flowers; seeing them in profile, or in macro views, often makes them seem fresh and interesting again. In truth, that’s what your glass work and painting does, too. We take in the world, and then re-present it to others, with a bit of ourselves included.
One of the botanicas was a similar close up of an iris. The sexy parts.
I remember that series, and how much the pieces reminded me of Georgia O’Keeffe. Now, if only we could get our trees to be a little less sexy: our pollen count hit 10,000 before declining a bit.