yay zinnias!

To me, zinnias are the perfect mid-summer garden flower: brilliantly colorful, oddly sturdy and a little sassy in their unwillingness to be carbon-copy blossoms, one just like the other. I never have any success growing them at my farm - they get eaten by rabbits - so when I saw them for sale today in a NYC greenmarket, I bought them, pricey as they were. The farmer who sold them to me told me that his trip into Manhattan from southern Jersey took him three hours - two hours for the highway trip - a distance of about 100 miles - then a third hour to creep along from the Lincoln Tunnel into the heart of the city, 15 miles at most. What a trooper!

saturday morning petunia

quick study

5" x 5" oil on linen panel

buttercups!

This is prime time for wildflowers in upstate New York. The fields and roadsides are covered with daisies and clover, little pale purple flowers that look like a cross between asters and daisies, tiny blue flowers - it is really quite something to see. I remember the first run I took here 24 years ago this month, I kept myself occupied by counting the different varieties of flowers I saw as I ran along the back river road: I stopped counting somewhere in the fifties and that didn't include flowering shrubs or trees. If you look out into the distance right now, you can see fields of pale yellow - not the brilliant solid patches of lime-yellow like the mustard fields in France, but a richer shade as if the color has been lightly scumbled over the green grasses beneath. Those are masses of buttercups - one of the daintiest little flowers around. When I was a child we used to hold them up under our chins and the bright reflection would prove just how much we loved butter!

pansies!

5" x 7" oil on linen