The china berry trees to the right as you leave the front entrance (and at least one on the left) are blooming. You have to look closely or you will miss it but the top third of the trees are a mass of tiny purple buds.

You can see a small piece in the lower right corner in this flower arrangement. There are about 30 plants altogether, all native from the ranch, except the Larkspur is from our flowerbed and planted from seed. It is the topmost stem of light green buds just right of center.

This pink flower top Jean has identified as Lemon Mint or Lemon BeeBalm and was probably planted from seed by her a few years ago. I took the picture it a few weeks ago and I only saw one or two of these off the road. I agree with her that "it is amazing how hard" it is to identify plants.

Update: 5/16/2010. I'm noticing BeeBalm everywhere. It's never a lot in the same place but if you look for it as you drive down the road, it's more common than you might think. I named this picture "BeeBalm, Blanket, Butterfly, and ButterBall" - all very scientific and exact. Uh, well, maybe not either, but very alliterative. (Yea, click on it if you don't know what it means, it's a good tool to own :)

In this arrangement you can see more results of the two hours or so I spent wandering around this weekend. I coundn't find my man card anywhere, but I still had fun looking :)

Lets balance the beautiful with the raw...

I knew this weedy plant has big yellow berries later in the season, though this is a current pic. I got lucking googling "yellow berries on weed".

The odd thing is, the link telling me this was Silverleaf Nightshade says "A serious agricultural weed in the south-west of Western Australia. Native to America." Wildflower.org says it is also called Horse Nettle, or Bullnettle and is poisonous, or "thought to be". No takers here...