Monthly Archives: May 2023

New Season New Backyard Show

A bachelor’s button from the Peace Garden

My neighbors and I started a joint flower garden that spans our borders. We call it the Peace Garden – a play of the Canadian-North Dakota garden.

An upright prairie coneflower

We are trying to keep everything MONative – native to Missouri. The summers are hot and dry, they take care of themselves.

The Coreopsis steals the show in May

There is a sister garden too that has a spiderwort that shows off all day most of the summer.

The never ending blooms of the spiderwort makes this a major star
Pot pouri – coneflower – tickseed – primrose
The first purple coneflower looks a bit ragged, but there will be hundreds soon.
Emerging
The goldfinches will be happy
Anthers – pollinators are already thrilled
Todays Spiderwort Blooms
Breakfast
Sometimes even the plants aren’t morning people. This struggling coneflower said, “get that camera out of my face!”
Good morning! Have a wonderful day.

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Traveling Back in Time on the Natchez Trace

It’s a sad story really…

Presidents’ Day Weekend. Kind of fitting, so many of their decisions created the trauma and drama of the Trace

We started in Holly Mississippi where Ida B Wells Barnett got her start at Rust College. The Coffee was terrible, the art was folksy.

Rich music comes from this region 🎶
Spring Beauty appeared in mid- February.
The Endless Battle Between Human and Nature
This National Park Site runs from Nashville to Natchez

It’s ultimately a clash between humanity and manifest destiny. The Choctaw and the Chickasaw were slowly pushed out of these lands as the Trace brought a continuous moving chain of settlers. One treaty and broken treaty after another, the Native People lost it all. They had their own Trail of tears tears before the Cherokee.

The Slave owners built mansions to celebrate the removal of the Native Tribes. These people named their houses in their “honor”? This is the Cherokee house. Across the street was the Choctaw House. The Audacity!
Natchez does throw a good Marci Gras party.
Across the Mississippi in Louisiana, you will find the mysterious mounds of Poverty Point. The people who lived here created a thriving city of 10,000 and built these mounds. Maybe in just one summer over 2000 years ago.

Slavery, poverty, the destruction of cultures, underlies all the beauty of Mississippi. I can never be happy there. But, I continue to return.

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Filed under American History, National Parks, Photography, Uncategorized