Wildflower report: Penstemons are blooming on the Front Range where our BBQ will be! Here they are with a sphinx moth.
Here's a little story about penstemon.
I was driving my daughter to the school bus stop one morning in early summer. On my way back up the mountain, I approach our new neighborhood entrance sign, one that has caused quite a controversy in our housing development. Some say only the realtors benefit from a new entrance sign, and others grouse that upstart housing developments between the sign and our community are riding on our coattails.
The new sign is much more substantial than the one it replaced, which featured a moderne asymmetrical oblong in wood. The old sign seemed to go with our most famous landmark, the “clamshell” house where Woody Allen filmed the movie Sleeper. The new sign is set in a flagstone wall. In fact, the flagstones are in place, meticulously set by stonemasons this spring, but the lettering for the sign is yet to arrive, so there’s a blank space in the center of the wall.
But the space is not blank this morning. As I drive closer, I see that someone or several someones have taken advantage of this artistic opportunity to draw something in the blank space. I can’t quite make out what the drawing is, but it looks to me exactly like the blossom of the one-sided penstemon that is now blooming on our mountain slopes. This little blue flower is one of the most prolific in the area, and there are many variations. I am often confused about the different types of penstemons, because they nearly all seem to be one-sided to me; that is, the flowers are arrayed like flags from the sunny side of the stem. There are tall ones, fuzzy leafed and leathery leafed ones, and there is the short bushy Blue Mist Penstemon that looks, from a distance, exactly like its name.
What a good idea for some young naturalist-slash-graffiti artist to make us more aware of the beauty around us, I think, as I drive closer. Now, I can see that the naturalist(s) have also been thoughtful enough to label their creation. “Pens” it says in a scrawl underneath the flower. Maybe they ran out of room. But no. As I whiz by, I see an “i” before the s. It actually says, “Penis.” Oh. Silly me. Penis. Of course.
I could get upset by the wanton defacement of the entrance to our upstanding community. But instead, I find myself laughing. It would be like chastising the rain for falling, the wind for blowing, and the earthworms for turning trees into soil. It’s May, after all, and the young vandals (they’re obviously youths) are displaying the closest thing to penstemon blossoms that they have. It may not attract many honey bees, but it’s the only way they know. They are responding to Nature just as surely as the flowers and wildlife are. I’ll probably not be laughing in a year or two, when my daughter enters high school. Sobering thought. But, I hope a walk down a mountain trail and along a sunny meadow will restore my perspective.
The rectangle is blank when I next pass by the sign, and there’s a utility truck and a man with a paintbrush, as well as a woman with a camera and a frown. There’s also, I notice, a patch of ground that would be a good place for penstemons.
