No matter how you want to race through this day or run away from this place, you are invited to live fully-right here, right now.Popular Instagram poet and bestselling author Morgan Harper Nichols gives you the ultimate love letter to your mind, heart, soul, and body, reminding you: This illustrated collection of poetry and prose invites you to stumble into the sunlight and delight in the wild and boundless grace you've been given. “Plants are amazing, I’m telling you.A celebration of hope.

All the seeds of all of these gorgeous flowers we see were there, and no one could have told,” said botanist Lucinda McDade, director of the California Botanic Garden in Claremont. “The seed bank is a really very, very precious thing, mysterious as it is.

Long after they’re gone, they may inspire a renewed desire to protect the land’s ability to surprise and delight us the way it has this year. This season’s flowers might leave behind more than the seeds of future blooms. “Just providing more things to think about, some extra layers, without just being like, ‘No, that’s bad, don’t like that flower.’ That’s the nuance of a real-life conversation.” What do you think that plant thinks?’” he said. And do we see what it’s doing to the other plants around it? Those ones have some pretty flowers too, but they’re kind of in the shade now. All the rain made them huge! Here’s where this plant comes from. “I’ll say, ‘Yeah, it’s amazing how big these got. Wise says he tries not to crush that sense of wonder.

When Wise takes groups of children on nature hikes and they see plants taller than they are, they don’t bother to ask if they’re invasive before exclaiming with joy. Today’s wildflowers will make further deposits into the seed bank that can survive in the soil for years until the right conditions come along - provided no one plows them under to build a big-box store or put up a parking lot.

It’s an evolutionary strategy that lets plants play the long game: A few seeds from the bank are deputized to flower and drop more seeds, while the rest hold off on entering the vulnerable baby plant stage until conditions are more promising.Ī bumper year like this one is both a visual feast and a down payment on future blooms. In periods of prolonged drought like we’ve experienced the last few years, many annual plants will allow only a selection of their seeds to flower. “Then they get a good rain and a cold winter to prime them beforehand, and they go crazy.” “They can hang out there until the next good year,” which could be next season or the next decade. For a native annual like our state flower, the California poppy, “their whole life cycle is based on flowering quickly and making seeds and getting those seeds into what we call the seed bank in the soil,” he said.

You were blooming all along