The rainy season may be (mostly) over, but the full flowering super bloom sweeping Southern California is everywhere. How about them lilacs down the street? Or this sunflower rising from a nearby construction zone? Road crews have worked that sidewalk and street all Winter, seemingly. It’s amazing there is soil enough to grow anything, let alone something so sudden and big. But, hey, the small patch of dirt sits at the bottom of an incline, where water (lots of it) flows fast and the right elements were just right.
By the way: Seems like nothing sprouting out of the earth can grow fast enough, this Spring. We are overtaken by plants not just thick and lush but towering upward. The newspapers prattle on about the super bloom, but I am awed by the super sizes of every green leaf thing. Gardeners and landscapers are overworked—and with the President tightening up border crossings, I can’t imagine there are enough (illegal) immigrant workers to whack weeds and mow the grass. Oh, and for the record, California has officially cancelled the drought. Too much of a good thing is…
Fast-growing sunflowers such as this one loom like I imagine a Triffid would. Menacing, predatory, but fortunately not human-eating.
I captured the Featured Image, on April 3, 2019, while walking up Howard Avenue from Florida towards the Sprouts market, in the University Heights neighborhood. Vitals: aperture manually set: f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/550 sec, 63mm; 10:20 a.m. PDT. The companion photo is the uncropped original, for perspective. I used Fujifilm GFX 50R and Fujinon GF63mmF2.8 R WR lens.
Update, April 6, 2019: Oh no! Someone stole the sunflower! I shot the photo, which was cropped to remove a license plate number, using Google Pixel 3 XL. Vitals: f/1.8, ISO 62, 1/5882 sec, 4.44mm; 12:49 p.m. PDT, today.