Never Underestimate Glorious Flower Power

Flower power.  It's not the sixties,  this isn't Woodstock or San Francisco, and  we're not hippies or flower-children, but I admire flowers anyway.  I admire people who admire flowers too, whether they wear them in their hair or not.    I always have, and always will.
Flower people are good people.  That's one of the reasons we should never underestimate glorious flower power.

At Incoming Bytes we observe the unusual.  Strange things at times. Surprising things. Unexpected things.   It continues to surprise me how little we actually know about  flowering plants that seem to exist only to beautify our surroundings.

Some seem to be quite set in their ways, inevitably soothing our souls, but flowering the same way every year, in the same place, at the same time in the season.  Some grow quickly.  There are tiny blossoms and huge ones. Some seem to take forever to bloom, only to have the blossoms fade immediately. Some taste good and others smell terrible.

Some flowers follow the sun too.  Sunflowers do, vast fields of sunflowers inevitably have every flower blossom   facing and following  the sun with unbelievable, powerfully  unspoken,  but  precise, delicate and elegant choreography.  Ask Alex, she'll tell you.  Alexandra Heep is the Sunflower power expert, you'll quickly find out why in her fascinating blog  'aheepofsunflowers' 
Maybe Alex can even tell  us why this sunflower is so unique!

                              A Beautiful, Unique Sunflower               photo credit (c)  Wendy L. Kukkee

She'll probably tell us there are a gazillion species of sunflowers.  No matter;  flowers really are glorious.

It's not only sunflowers that surprise either. Flowers are no less than amazing at times.
 
Are flowers powerful because they exist only to make us happy? Check out this Morning Glory, -- it looks like someone in that flower turned on the light just for us, or was it  switched on to showcase  the magnificent, tiny dew-drop jewels decorating her person?  Perhaps this is the real source of flower-power.

                       Morning Glory and her Light                                    (c) r.a.kukkee 2011

That's not all.    This  special Morning Glory has done something else that is no less than amazing.   She  survived no fewer than three major frosts, the last one being some -6C,  which is 21F, and no matter which  temperature scale you choose, that's  frozen- frozen, half-inch-ice-on-the-bucket frozen,  --and  too cold for delicate FLOWERS....or is it?

We took pity on the sad, frozen thing out on the deck, carried her --um...., rolled her by plant-ambulance complete with huge flowerpot-- into the house.  She sat for a couple of days looking dejected, rejected and pathetic, so we  picked off the many frozen- dead leaves, stuck some sticks into the pot for support,  and stood her back up.   
Flower power.  This is how she rewarded us. Perhaps only our gardening zeitgeist, our own Glory Lennon can explain this one....

      Frozen Morning Glory in all her Glory                             (c) r.a.kukkee 2011

 Doesn't that beat all?  The magnificent come-back flower-power kid is not only blossoming, and her vines are growing and climbing ever higher, ever faster.                 Glorious flower power at it's best.  

Remember the powerful light in the single blossom? Maybe there IS a bigger power source available here than we recognize. Perhaps each one of those blossoms  now has it's own 400 watt bulb in it.  That must be it.  Flower power.   Food for thought. Food for beautiful people. Food for people I admire.  Flower people. 



That's my story and I'm sticking to it.