Purple Crocus

Purple Crocus
(KROH-kus)
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Well since people seemed to like the Purple Pansy that was posted here a couple of days ago I thought this group of Purple Crocus might be nice to see. A couple of the people that left comments on that post said they had a hard time photographing purple flowers. I haven’ t found that myself but it is a little hard to get a true purple sometimes. These flowers actually were a little darker than what is represented here. Photoshop probably could have corrected that for me but I decided to leave it as the camera recorded it. IMO red is a much harder color to capture than purple. Although after participating in Ruby Tuesday for a couple of months my fear of trying to take pics of red flowers seemed to dissolve with the practice I got from doing it.

It is really cold here tonight and I bet these little beauties are wrapped for the evening. I wasn’t sure why flowers close up at night but did find this definition of the process, which is called Nyctinasty onWikipedia:

“Nyctinasty is the circadian rhythmic nastic movement of higher plants in response to the onset of darkness. Examples are the closing of the petals of a flower at dusk and the sleep movements of the leaves of many legumes.

Nyctinastic movements are associated with diurnal light and temperature changes and controlled by the circadian clock and the light receptor phytochrome. Several leaf-opening and leaf-closing factors have been characterized biochemically.” It seems it is like most things flowers do a scientific process.



Today is my first weekend at work for the season. My doctors have kindly suggested that I cut down my spring work schedule from 70-80 hours a week in a normal year to about 40 or 50 this year.