This is aloe-blooming time, along with most other plants in spring, of course. The taller and fuller the flowers grew, the harder it became to walk past them without stopping.
Oh, that colour. Those shades!
Every single time they stopped me in my tracks, and I would spend a while just staring, properly spellbound. As the photos show, the flower is roughly peachy orange, shifting from a warmer, redder orange toward a dusty blue at the tips, where a yellow rim opens and pale yellow pistils poke through.
The thing is, a photo cannot truly carry the whole shade: the velvety texture beneath it, or the way the colour meets light, shadow, sky, and wind. Colours in nature are not squeezed from a tube of paint or picked from a box of pencils. They are so much richer, mixed in such strange relationships and gradients, that all you can really do is admire them with your whole heart.
