Blooming

A look back at a few things growing during 2025.

My annual October pilgrimage to the Quaking Bog.

-Mary Oliver

It doesn't matter how many times we go back, there will always be something different to pay attention to on San Juan Island. The trip we took this August was less focused on photos and more on family time, but here are a few textures and the Sturgeon Moon.

-The Faeries, William Allingham

Floating down the Meramec River on a raft with a few companions and a few more adult beverages seems like a popular summer pastime in Missouri.

San Juan scenes. There's beauty at every scale there - and I didn't even take photos of the mountains, or the scale of the trees, or the breadth of the sea.

Exploring William O’Brien State Park was one of my favorite aspects of 2020. I saw my first ever sandhill cranes on the first day we went last spring, and over the summer and fall spotted a lot more wildlife and practiced identifying all kinds of plants. It was a pleasure to go back in January, on a day where freezing fog had coated everything in a lovely veil of ice. Not sure where that blood at the base of the tree came from, though. 

The Minnehaha dog park is an offleash wonderland that I’ve had the pleasure of going to a couple times with friends, both two and four-legged. The dogs always seem to have a great time, and I do too. It’s impossible not to have your mood boosted by watching dogs play and explore in every direction.

Mostly I’d been excited about time with friends spent unplugged from the larger world, and I feel sad about all all the pictures I didn’t get to take. But hey, there’s always next time.

I’ll never get tired of looking closely at nature. Top 3 - Jay Cooke State Park in early June. The rest are from this week at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, where it’s the prairie’s time to shine.

I spent an embarrassing amount of time over the last year worrying whether the ferns in our front yard would come up again. They’d been trampled a little during summer construction; they didn’t have any leaf-litter insulating them when the snows came. I love them, the lushness and texture they add, the fan of their leaves, the shapes they make. And a couple weeks ago they started coming up, and they’ve unfurled a little more, a little taller, every day since. It turns out they didn’t need my worry. They were only waiting in the dark for it to be warm enough, bright enough, to grow again. They knew what they were doing the whole time.  

But spring is still (slowly!) arriving here, and soon the plants will emerge, and hopefully I’ll get to photograph some of them.