FLOWERS AND BIRDS — Sharon Mark Cohen

He loves me, he loves me not...

To count how many times I passed the minutes at the bungalows in the Catskills of my childhood, picking petals from daisies and reciting those fairy tale lines would be impossible.

That said, it’s no wonder the daisy is my favorite flower. Yearly, I wait impatiently for the showcase in our yard to bloom. Yet, I don’t know if I realized their true beauty until I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and snapped a closeup of the flower head, also known as the floral disc. What a beauty it is.

While red is my favorite color, yellow has always been my second favorite. Just look at the staggering work of nature showcasing a collection of perfectly aligned yellow disc flowers smack in the center of the delicate white ray flowers.

One of my biggest joys was walking around our yard when our granddaughter lived nearby and introducing her to the various flowers, shrubs, and trees using their names. Whenever she walked by the ground covering and announced “pachysandra” correctly, it gave me a thrill, as she was only two.

Knowing the identity of the plants seems to be a lost art, only regaining the popularity it had when I was in grammar school with the help of smartphone apps. Of course, there are apps for everything now, but use caution and remember there is nothing like the real thing.

Notably, we were concerned when our son Judd’s very experienced fifth-grade teacher told us it didn’t matter if he could spell. She insisted he could use spellcheck on the computer.

To counter that theory, my brother Stu picked up a misspelling in one of my blog posts, which the spellchecker may not have known. There, the sentence had the word “synch,” which should have been written as “cinch.”

When I lamented, "Look how many people will be spelling it incorrectly because of me,” my husband said not to worry. He was sure no one other than Stu noticed the misspelling.

Let’s get back to basics. Do you know the names of flowers, trees, and birds?

As for the birds, the male cardinal is my favorite feathered friend. You guessed it ——his red color attracts me. That’s probably why I spotted the birdie perched in the center of our Magnolia tree before quickly capturing him on film.

Admittedly, I don’t know the breed of bird in the picture I snapped in Town Center, Big Sky, Montana. By the way, its wing span was grand, but unfortunately, I missed that shot. (Update! After reading this blog post, my friend Kevin contacted me with the name of the bird after using the Merlin app from Cornell Lab of Ornithology —The black-billed magpie. Knowing its name, I posted a picture of the wingspan after doing a google search).

From the trees in last week’s blog post at sharonmarkcohen.com, Trees Reach to the Sky, to the flowers and birds in today's, such beauty surrounds us——how many flowers and birds can you name? Which ones are your favorites?

Can you spell pachysandra, rhododendron, or viburnum? Is that the next thing I’ll teach our granddaughter Solly or shall we allow her to use spellcheck? I did this time!