Life On the Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

Close up of some yellow iris

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Yellow iris are considered a nuisance weed, in  many parts of the country. (Somebody once define a weed as a flower nobody likes.) Nuisance weeds are a lesser problem than  noxious weeds, according to the Department of Ecology, and I would agree. But some weeds, including this one, are quite beautiful. They grow from bulbs, but produce seeds, from which the plants will sprout.

Ours came from Lake Washington's Magnuson Park, where we used to take our Black Lab for daily walks. My wife gathered the seeds when the lovely blooms were over, and they lived in an old envelope for many years until we moved to the lake. There she planted them along the shoreline. Over the years they prospered. That is the bad thing about weeds. Or perhaps the good thing, if they provide neat borders and are pretty.

Ours are getting a bit out of hand, and soon I will have to cut them back, for they are obscuring the access to our dock, and the dock is important to me, for I often fly fish from it in the evening.

So some of the iris will have to go, but only a minimum, I assure you.

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I paint, and sometimes a cartoon in ArtNews strikes me as particularly funny. As did this one. It is by Dusan Petricic.

Must I explain it? Okay. The cleaning woman (presumably in a museum or art gallery) has vacuumed up all the lower dots in a pointillist painting, leaving  it the start of a bare canvas.

Enough already.

A bit hard to see in dense cover, this species has a beautifully mottled posterior, pale and full of darker dots

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And while we are deep into a nature perspective, here is an odd visitor to our feeder at the lake. It is the mourning dove, though there seems to be nothing particularly sad about this pair of hungry birds. they have come back for several days, and we look forward to their reappearance.

They are not shy, and can be approached at the window or even directly from the deck--up to a distance of maybe fifteen feet. Which is plenty close. And they are becoming addicted to the ordinary bird food. Oddly, they feed neatly, without the constant spilling of the juncos and finches, which must be part of a regenerative planting process.

An odd species, every now and then, comes as a delightful surprise, and reminds us of the time, in our Seattle days, when we spotted a magpie on a telephone wire. Magpies are indigenous to the Eastern part of the state, some hundreds of miles away.

How a stray got over here remains unexplained, along with whether or not the stray ever got back home.

Thanks for the visit,
Robert C. Arnold, Editor