Malinda Lo

Spring is in the air here in Northern Cal! How can I tell? Allergies have returned.

But I can’t really get upset about it, because all sorts of other wonderful things happen. I get to encounter things like this on my hikes near my house:

I tried to look up this flower online to figure out its name, but I could not find it. If you know the name of this flower, I’d love to hear it. Clearly I need to buy a guidebook or something.

I did find the name of this lovely thing, though. It is the extremely prosaic stickseed.

I think it should be renamed the blue-eyed honey. But I’m not in charge of naming flowers. Here’s the blue-eyed honey’s much better-known sibling, the iris:

Pretty, but I feel like the iris is a bit overblown. I’m much more into the madrone tree. Here is one with particularly lithe branches:

Spring also means newly budded leaves, fresh and tender:

There are other things on the forest floor, too. Like this mushroom, almost alien-like:

But nothing beats this strange fruit I encountered:

Nothing says spring more than this: life, erupting.