Clematis

The view out my window during the winter is grim.

In certain spiritual or poetic moods, I can find beauty in the tangle of last year's blackberry vines and crumbling grey-brown basalt, but generally, I look and all I see is the tangle, a reminder of mortality and entropy.

Which makes the blooming of the clematis vine such a delight. It's been in place since I moved in two years ago, but only this year does it look like somebody's planning a wedding down on the back driveway. A climbing vine, it seems ecstatic to have the wall of crumbling grey-brown basalt and the rockfall containment fencing to clamber up. Its highest bloom-bearing tendrils are at about the fifth floor level, so I have to stretch my neck a bit to see them from my desk chair, but they are well worth the effort (which is probably good for me anyway, since I tend to get kind of hunched over as I sit peering into my laptop screen.)

I will now go downstairs with my phone and attempt to photograph the clematis in all its glory. Oops.  No I won't, it's raining. But it won't be raining in a few minutes, so I'll do it then.

And meanwhile I will brag on Terwilliger Plaza because the groundskeeper maintains a web page listing and depicting what's currently blooming. Without Brian's page, I would have no way of knowing that this plant is clematis -- apple blossom clematis, to be specific. So nice to be able to address my plant friends by name.