If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable… then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter 4 (16 July 1903), Letters to a Young Poet
Mournful widows – Scabiosa atropurpurea – blowing in the wind amidst grass in the middle of Sagres. This town, now a haven for surfers all year round, is located on the southwestern tip of Portugal, known as ‘the end of the world.’
Roadside Wild Flowers
By the end of Spring the wild flowers line the edges of the road verge waving at any cars that drive past. By the summer they are dormant in the summer heat, waiting for the rains to awake them again the following year. The blue flowers are edible Chicory – Cichorium intybus – and the pink ones are Scabiosa atropurpurea, also commonly known as Mournful widows or Pincushions.
These wild flowers are all on our lane in the rural countryside of central Algarve.
The wild leeks – Allium ampeloprasum – stand guard throughout the flower meadows in the spring.
The glorious pinks of native flowers including the Grey-Leaved Rock Rose – Cistus albidus, Scabiosa atropurpurea and Pink Bindweeds – Convolvulus althaeoides.
If you pause and look closely at the small wild flowers on the edges of roads and sides of fields, you can be amazed by the beauty of nature’s small things. They nourish the wild life and pollinators and as native plants add ecological richness to the land.
The wild flowers in this Up Close series were all shot in the Algarve, Portugal. The Wild Gathering and Roadside Wild Flowers will soon be available as prints.
Copyright Kriss MacDonald. All rights reserved.