Forget me Not — Part One

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On a sandy spit of temporary island heaped up in last winter’s storms, blooming in profusion between foot-wide rivulets of Nameless Creek, we discovered a sea of pale blue flowers. (You can see a bit of red barn roof in the background.)While we had never seen this plant before on our place, I recognized it, drawing from some seldom-visited recess of plant-taxonomic memory, as a member of the Borage Family, characterized by just the kind of infloresence–or flower-growth arrangement–as we saw here in miniature. Lovely, and all the more so for being so unexpected a find on a routine walk: forget-me-not, Mysotis scorpiodes.

But more about this plant tomorrow and Friday.

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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