Nights have turned very cold here and dawn reveals frost flowers everywhere. They're wonderful to examine close up, always so weird, and each one unique. Frost flowers are the antithesis of everything flowers are supposed to be. It's in the nature of actual flowers to be regimented in form. As part of the machinery of reproducing the species, they have to match the blueprint. Evolution does require the occasional freak, but day to day survival is all about lack of originality. Frost flowers are all freaks, absolutely lacking pattern. Utterly ephemeral, they beget nothing, and as far as I know, abet nothing in the life cycle of the plant. They're like the creation of some alien god, who wants to please us with a familiar gift, but doesn't get it quite right.
Photo by Josiah Johnston from Wikipedia.
2 comments:
this is amazing, something completely new to me, thank you for the post!
Gently beautiful
I'm not sure how far north frost flowers are common. It takes a fairly warm day followed by a cold night to produce them. They really have an otherworldly quality.
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