they look like bluebonnets from here.

i live in azalea country, they love it here. mostly sandy, with lots and lots and lots of pine trees --> loads of pine straw to turn the soil acid [pH of the groundwater here is ~5-ish].

lots of azalea bushes here [old neighborhood in old city] with old azalea bushes nearly as tall as one-story houses.

and welcome back from irl too! :)

thanks for the info, i've always wondered what that one is, it's one of my favorites.

the [now identified] spiderwort, the dewberries, the little yellow unidentified flower, and the tiny tiny unidentified purple flowers are all weeds wildflowers growing in my yard, as is the first azalea blossom. the rest are all from around the neighborhood.

the cats are going to go nuts when all the dewberries ripen and the small furred and feathered critters come out to fight over the berries.

we've had some bouts of wild weather this spring, with water coming down out of the sky in torrents that can't exactly be called rain - gully washers comes to mind, as i've watched portions of my yard wash away... and i think our overnight lows are set to drop down to about 60 degrees one more time before summer sets in....

glad you enjoyed the flowers! i have gazillions more photos but they're all either azaleas or camellias - wonderful to drive around a town that's awash in blooms, but boring to look at photo after photo of essentially the same three or four flowers.

ok, that almost entirely makes up for the fact that i don't live right on the beach and have rosa rugosa growing in my yard.

all i need now are some sea oats [i've got the sandspurs already too].

thanks for the identifications. i didn't even now where to begin looking them up. in grad school i studied a lot of ecology and population biology statistics using plantsplantsplants, because it's easier to get lots of data on organisms that don't move around much, but as an oceanographer wannabe, i have to admit that i never bothered to actually learn anything about plants themselves [especially the terrestrial ones] if i could help it.

i have lots of cat briar in my yard too [and it's aptly named, believe me]:

funny that i should have a dog, cats, spiders, and lots of frogs here....

I'll post some pics when it starts to grow.

This shit is infesting and nesting, I swear I hate it. I almost had a tree brought down by this stuff, the tree hasn't totally bounced back yet. It roots into the bark of the tree as it grows up around it. It's also almost completely taken over my fence line.

Nasty oily looking leaves too, attracts flies. The leaves aren't poisonous, at least not to any of us. I call it kudzu, but I don't think that's exactly what it is. Insidious though.

speaking of cobras...

alas, those rocks [and that particular plant] are in somebody else's yard. it was the photo that best [but still kind of fuzzy] shows how not just the stems but also the edges of the leaves have thorns. which os the chief difference between it and the vine i've always known as greenbrier.

slightly pink, almost white describes this tree perfectly. from a distance it looked almost, but not quite, like a [white] dogwood. do want. i'd never seen one up close before, but now it's on my list of things i want to have when [if ever] i get my own place.

that big yellow flower did not even look real, and i'd never seen anything like it before. glad to know what it is.

there was a big no trespassing sign next to the day lilies [i cropped it out of the photo] so i didn't get any close-ups. i took the photo because it looked so much like the patch of day lilies my grandmother had in her yard, kind of cool to think that it might be the same heritage variety.

thanks, nomnomnom!