(Taken Wednesday)

You've heard all about how a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, this one is just a temptation to write a thousand words to tell you that this is a poor imitation of what it really looked like. In real life there was none of the grey tinge of the picture; the sky was a clear, deep blue, the hill was vivid green. Yes, vivid, which comes from the Latin for "alive" was exactly what it was, moving with mild eddies of wind and bending under the feet of hundreds of contented creatures, bees and butterflies. My feet were not quite so graceful as those of the bees and butterflies, but I was mighty contented too. It was like falling into a picture a child had painted with the unmixed colors out of a dollar watercolor box. Where the hill was not green, it was an impossible yellow, and where it was not yellow or green, it was lavander.

This was the flower responsible for the lavander patches. I'm at the start of a busy weekend (following a busy week) and don't have time to ferret out what it is--but details will follow.

[EDITED 04/23/08] It appears to be a wild heliotrope, Phacelia distans, or something closely related to it.