Hello, lovely

discovering that the thing you're making plans for was already unfolding, all along

Thanks for connecting here at Nature Moments, where we explore the wonders unfolding in the world all around us all the time. I hope my photography + stories will inspire you to be curious, be amazed, and then do it again!

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There are a handful of wildflowers that seem entirely luxurious to me, like they should be gracing the cultivated gardens of high society, and here they are, scattered among the wilds.

This reminds me, of course, that all of those luxurious blossoms cultivated in high-society gardens trace all of their roots right back to the same wild soils that are common to us all. Common as dirt, every last one of us :)

The Northern Blue Flag Iris is one of these entirely luxurious wild specimens. It is native to northeastern wetlands, where it elevates a sometimes untidy, marshy landscape with radiant elegance. It likes damp feet, and will often fringe shorelines to stunning effect.

Here it stands in prime habitat, along the damp edges of sparkling Jordan Pond in Acadia National Park. Purple irises, pink granite cobbles, turquoise waters. It looks like someone carefully arranged a still life for a master class for watercolor artists.

Now, in the part of rural Maine where I live, there is this one particular everyday landscape that really effectively approximates natural wetlands: roadside ditches.

And I will tell you, there is nothing as incongruous as the statuesque amethyst beauty of an elegant Northern Blue Flag Iris ascending from the grassy tumble of a roadside ditch!

This time of year, we have the most ridiculously magnificent roadside ditches, bejeweled as they are with exquisite violet botanical sculptures!

I’ve only recently begun to contemplate how to introduce these beauties into our own little gardens. We have a number of damp areas on our land, including a meandering contour of watershed which we call “the Reservoir” (because I enjoy giving grand names to humble spaces). It should provide excellent habitat for a Northern Blue Flag Iris, but how should I begin?

Should I:

order from our local nursery?

check back later this year for wild seedpods?

shamelessly take a shovel to a nearby ditch?

I just wasn’t certain about the right approach…

But as it turns out, some obliging wild creature had already made the decision for me!

During a stretch of weeding and watering, and more watering, and watering extra in response to a heat dome event, I happened to spy a flash of purple among a tangle of wild grasses in the Reservoir. You already know how this story ends, but in that moment, I did not!

“Probably some Vetch,” I said to my husband as I strolled in its direction. Vetch is a wild rambling vine that climbs through everything in a meadow and introduces sprays of purple pea blossoms. Very common wildflower, very pretty, and almost always the source of a splash of vivid purple around our house.

But as I arrived at the edge of the watery Reservoir grasses, I laughed out loud. Because, of course, it was definitely a small, healthy colony of Northern Blue Flag Irises.

Up close, the clean lines of their blue-green sword leaves cut through the messy, marshy grasses, and half-a-dozen tall flower spikes were crowned with intricate violet blossoms.

I had been making my plans, but they had already been unfolding for months, completely unknown to me. And now here they were, my plans and my answers, springing out of the ground, just waiting for my eyes to wander across the confusion and come to rest upon their manifestation.

In my faith, we have a saying: “Man makes his plans, but God directs his steps.” Planning is part of our nature - and a very healthy part of our nature, too! As we make our plans, we wonder, we learn, we gather, we include, we contemplate, we hope.

But we also must acknowledge our limitations. Our plans are beneficial exercises, but at the end of all of our plans, life takes control. This can be scary. Or frustrating. Or liberating!

Turns out, in my garden, I’m not the only one planting seeds. I sometimes forget that. As I make my plans and plant my seeds, there are other forces always at work with their own plans and their own seeds. And they can intersect my efforts in very beautiful ways. If I’m there for it.

It just might be, in a season that looks like nothing but a desperately tangled wasteland, that my plans are already growing in hidden spaces, reaching towards a future light. The Irises I’m planning for right now might already have been planted.

And these, of course, will turn out to be the best Irises of all, the fruit of a gift being even more delightful than the fruit of a plan. 💜

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