‘Tis the season for flowers to go a-blooming.

Dandelion after Yesterday’s Four Inches of Snow Went Away

Oh, who’s that hiding behind the flower, being all shy, like?

When we were all about eleven years old and training ourselves never to smoke cigarettes by teaching ourselves how to smoke cigarettes by sneaking out behind the school and cutting off chunks of wild clematis with our jacknives and the matches we brought from home and smoking little pithy tubes (not one person in that class ever smoked after that, and for good reason. Smoking wild clematis is guaranteed to cure you of any desire to seem glamorous with smoke pouring out of your nostrils.), knapweed first came to the Okanagan. It got on our fingers when we were pulling out stalks of grass to suck on them and look like we were on the set of Gunsmoke, and tasted like the tar sands and the Exxon Valdez all rolled into one. Now it’s everywhere, the nasty stuff, and if you’ve ever heard cattle bawling, that’s probably why. Now, though, there’s a weapon, the knapweed root weevil, which I’ve photographed here, with hope, and here, with consternation, and now …

Knapweed Root Weevil

Hiding from Winter Behind a Dandelion

I think the whole idea of being imported to North America is awfully tough on Knapweed Root Weevils. They sure seem to like flowers a lot. Bummer. Just wait until their kids have lost the taste for perogies and vodka and the strong man strutting of Vladimir Putin, and strike out on their own. There’ll be some surprises, I suspect.