morning drizzle

This morn­ing the run­ners in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon are tak­ing to the streets down the hill from me. It’s over­cast and cool enough, for sure. But some­how I’m not feel­ing moti­vated to run 26 miles…

The locals have a name for these two months when the morn­ing cloud cover blots out the sun: May gray and June gloom. It makes for a slow eas­ing into sum­mer, good run­ning weather, and pro­longs the sea­son when you can hope to put plants in the ground and not have to worry too much about keep­ing them watered.

Yes­ter­day was extra-cool, and the thick marine layer of clouds made for a heavy driz­zle most of the day. For me the sight of rain­drops on plants is rare enough that I grabbed the camera.

Are pho­tos of rain­drops and dew­drops on plants and flow­ers cliches? Dunno. Even if they are, I think there’s some­thing so sat­is­fy­ing about them that peo­ple need to keep tak­ing them.

rain-on-datura-3

rain-on-datura-1

rain-on-echium-1

Below are all the pho­tos I took in smaller gallery for­mat. Going left to right: images 1–4, flow­ers of sacred datura, Datura wrightii; 5–6, leaves on tower of jew­els, Echium wild­pretii; 7, spi­der­web on Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia, Epi­lo­bium canum ‘Catalina’; 8, flow­ers of deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius.


May 31 2009 06:36 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • •

6 Responses to “morning drizzle”

  1. ryan on 31 May 2009 at 5:10 pm #

    I’m very much in favor of flow­ers and foliage with rain­drops on them. Espe­cially now that the rains have basi­cally ended for the year. Wouldn’t have expected it to rain in San Diego. Also, I am pro-datura pho­tos. Such an amaz­ing flower, such nice pho­tos. I can’t wait until ours bloom.

  2. Town Mouse on 31 May 2009 at 6:22 pm #

    Amaz­ing! Love the pho­tos! My hus­band was in San Diego last week and told me about the driz­zle when I picked him up from the air­port. Hard to believe. I sure hope we get a lit­tle wet stuff up here…

  3. lostlandscape on 31 May 2009 at 8:03 pm #

    Ryan, I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out how to use dat­uras in a native land­scape with­out peo­ple ask­ing, “Who snuck that trop­i­cal plant in there?” They just don’t look like any­thing else in the wilds. Yours should be bloom­ing before too long…

    Town Mouse, accord­ing to the offi­cial tally for yes­ter­day we got .04 inches of mois­ture down here yes­ter­day, the first pre­cip­i­ta­tion in two months. The Cham­ber of Com­merce doesn’t tell vis­i­tors about our May gray.

  4. James Golden on 03 Jun 2009 at 3:27 am #

    Shades of Geor­gia O’Keefe?

  5. Greg on 03 Jun 2009 at 7:10 pm #

    Oh, I don’t care if they are cliche or not, they are too delight­ful not to per­pet­u­ate. Plus, on those white blos­soms, the droplets help to define the space, which might oth­er­wise just appear as a big empty void in the photo.

    Funny, I’d never heard of this before, but this is the sec­ond time in 24 hours I’ve heard of this June Gloom of which you speak.

    I found a white datura with a pur­ple throat bloom­ing just down the road at the side of the har­bor last August, but when I went back to har­vest seeds a few days later, it had been mowed (mown?) down. I’ll be watch­ing for some this year and hope­fully will have bet­ter luck.

  6. lostlandscape on 04 Jun 2009 at 9:00 pm #

    James, I’m sure O’Keefe is in there some­where. And maybe Edward Weston’s Pep­per #30 (in the 1st datura).

    Greg, let me know if you can’t get to your local plants sooner this year. I’ll share some seeds. I’d guess mine is a dif­fer­ent species, but It’d at least work as an annual for you if you were to start it indoors.

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