2932 Flowers

Friday, April 16, 2010

Tall people with tons of nose hair should not make fun of short people.

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I forgot to mention the flowers in Morocco!

I was feeling a little bad because my daffodils were just starting to bloom when I left, and I knew they'd be past prime by the time I returned. But Morocco made up for it.

Of course there were planters and borders in the cities, and colorful vines spilling over the ancient walls, but the countryside was most spectacular. Fields and roadsides were a riot of wildflowers. Purple, blue, red, orange, yellow swaths. There were so many, and in such large clumps of single types, that it looked like they had been sown by passing trucks.*

At several roadside stops I wandered away from the rest areas to check out the flowers. Many of them were the same as we see along New York roads, but they were more dense. Those I didn't recognize tended to have much larger blossoms than the usual North American wildflower.

As we drove toward the Atlas mountains, I began to see more fields of beautiful red flowers - obviously not planted, obviously wild. They were poppies! I hadn't recognized them from the van because they were much smaller than poppies I'm used to. They were only about 6-8 inches tall, and the blossoms were at most two inches wide, but yeah, they were poppies. I kept thinking of Flanders Fields, and couldn't get the long ago memorized poem out of my head.

A few acres of red poppies, crowded in blossom, is pretty impressive.

* Actually, I suspect that the roadside flowers were sown by grazing flocks, deposited complete with natural fertilizer.
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