The biggest problem with spring is the unending demands on my time. Between the goats, chicks, garden and photographing spring wildflowers, I seem to do nothing but work and run.
Each item on my list is important. This year they are complicated by the rain storms that keep rolling through. Most drop only enough to be annoying, if welcome for the moisture.
One last one added an item to my list as it washed seven planks off the bridge. These must be found, collected and put back in place. In the meantime the goats stand gazing longingly over to the hill pasture.
I try to go out walking somewhere every day photographing spring wildflowers. Rain is not good for a digital camera so I pack a plastic bag just in case.
Many of the early spring wildflowers are ephemerals meaning they come up, bloom, set seed and vanish until next year. That makes it important to get out often as the flowers may only be there a day or two.
Photographing spring wildflowers is the easy part. It’s easy if you don’t count the ticks, mosquitoes, fallen trees to clamber over, poison ivy, standing water puddles, slippery gravel, steep hills and other fun things encountered. Yes, there are snakes, but I am far too noisy for them to stick around so I can spot them.
Once there are a hundred pictures or so on my camera (one or two walks worth), there is the time to download all of them. Each type of plant must be put into the proper folder so I can find it later.
I’ve been told I can simply tag the pictures. Then I have to know the names as unknown number will do nothing for retrieval. It’s easier to sort them by families as even ones I don’t recognize normally do end up in the right folder to make identification easier later on.
The final step is picking out the pictures, resizing them and placing them into the botany project page for that plant. There are roughly 2000 plants in Dent County and that is a lot of pages.
I’m setting up all the pages. So many of them are still blank as I’ve not found the plants yet. Perhaps I never will complete this project.
The best part is hunting for and photographing spring wildflowers, both old friends and new ones. And I’ve already found half a dozen new ones this year.
