One thing that I've noticed that I've noticed since I started using digital cameras, particularly with a macro lens, is flowers. If you've been reading this journal, you've noticed that, too. And not just the bright, showy ones.

The tiny ones.

I mean, these things are little.

Some them just a millimeter across, and none more than three. Now, the yellow ones above I'd noticed before. They grow in clumps on bare, wind-swept gravel ridgetops in the desert, and that bright yellow is kinda hard to miss.

And I'd seen these little blue ones before, too.

These things grow along the shoulders of sandy roads. The pretty flowers turn into nasty little spiked burrs. I identified it once, but now for the life of me (and the past hour) cannot remember what it is, or where I found the name.

First discovered these wee yellow blossoms as I was driving past the Arkansas Basin strutting ground.

But it wasn't that hard to see them, even at 20+ miles per hour, since they also bloom in clusters.

Probably the smallest flowers I've seen were last May, in the Seminoes. Down on my hands and knees trying to get decent shots of huge larkspurs, balsamroots and yellow violets (yes, these really were yellow violets), and there, under my palms, are these tiny, tiny flashes of pink. Not two millimeters across.

Little tubular blossoms on the end of what is otherwise just a plain weed. And next to them, equally small blue peas were blooming.

Have no idea what either one is. Or if they even belong there.

So, anyway. What brought these small flowers to mind, seeing as how the images were already loaded up and waiting for reference, was the brief hike the heeler sisters and I took to the waterfall in the dunes last month.

In the dry sand we (yes, "we"... heelers check out flowers, too) found a plant with clusters of tiny, lavender tubular flowers

which I'm assuming is some sort of Compositae. But at the stream above the falls, in a wet, spongy sphagnum area that the heelers were loath to wade into, I found two new tiny flowers.

These shots are less than exciting, since the macro lens was back at the truck, but I don't know if I would have knelt down in the several inches of cold muck to get better shots anyway. The blue flower

looks like some sort of miniaturized "periwinkle". The yellow blossoms were smaller, as in fly-sized

and more plentiful, looking like dwarf monkeyflowers.

Got no idea what these are either. They didn't garner the attention of the authors of any of my flower guidebooks. Anybody got a reference for online images of "tiny flowers"?

Last year's close-up of the blue flower busy turning into a burr.

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