Still Life and the Hero's Eyes

Just four more garden pix, but for the geeks a Microsoft analogy among the botanicals, and the cornflowers are startling.

This is not our garden, just a random shot of the vigorous Pacific Northwest undergrowth outside someone's fence in the neighborhood.

The blue lovelies above are cornflowers, of which I'd known nothing, except in my very limited experience with romance novels (sometimes you get insomnia on the road and there's not even a Gideon's Bible) the eyes of the leading man are sometimes said to be of cornflower blue. Never seen that colour in a human iris myself, but it's a good one. The bright red citizen is a Geum, a hardy vigorous kind of thing that you can ignore and it'll pepper your garden with these rough and ready scarlet smiles summerlong. The foliage is a bit scruffy though.

Vancouver is definitely rhododendron territory but we don't have many; I like the one above, it's a bit understated compared to some of its ilk but that's fine, unfortunately it cowers behind some bigger and brighter things so you don't see it.

The blue-on-boards above is mildly exotic, a native species called Western Jacob's Ladder.

Monoculture · We put in a nice new lawn two years back, we'd grown our own but it incurred lead pollution at the hands of a brainless contractor, so we ripped ours out and put down basic suburban sod. Now it's being invaded by all sorts of vigorous aliens including creeping buttercup, clover, dandelions (of course).

I know how they must feel in Redmond, these invaders are trying to screw up my, what would they say, “fantastic, innovative” lawn composition, they spread underground, they have hybrid vigour, they crowd out the grass, and nobody paid for them.

Bah! I will unleash steel death on them. Fortunately there's no equivalent of that weapon above for Open Source.

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