One of my favorite springtime wildflowers is the calypso orchid. It is fairly common in the woods in Washington State. The group below, mixed in with yellow stream violets, is at the Bloedel Nature Reserve on Bainbridge Island … I have never seen such a large grouping in the wild.
Trillium are a member of the lily family and are fairly common in Western Washington at all elevations, except for alpine environs. They occasionally are included in gardens, although they can be difficult to get started. My father was able to get a small patch growing in our yard years ago. I saw my first one of the spring a couple weeks ago.
When I first looked at this image, I thought it was a twin flowered stem. But it is two separate plants with close alignment. This was taken up near the top of Mt Rose in the SE corner of the Olympic Mountains … outside the Olympic National Park.
I recently upgraded to a new computer with a much larger SSD. That allowed me to put my archived photos inside my Lightroom catalog. That let me easily go through the archive and see if I had changed my mind on some of the images. Some of them went back years, so it had been a while since I had really taken a good hard look at them. As a result, I found a number that I had no idea why I had put them in the archive catalog.
This image is an example of that. The original image was very low resolution (taken many years ago) and it looks pretty ‘soft’ now. But it’s lovely, just the same. The location is in the Olympic National Park, on the ridge between the North Fork Dosewallips and the West Fork, above Thousand Acre Meadows, just below Hayden Pass. It isn’t visited frequently, since it is over 20 miles from the trailhead and you are traveling off trail.
No, this isn’t from some mountain meadow… it’s from my front yard. I love having the heather bloom all winter — giving what few bees are around some flowers to visit. The boulder was likely a glacial erratic that was on the property, but that was before my time here.