Mama Alice Flowers

My regular readers may realize that my daughter Alice was named for her great-great grandmother, Alice Lewis Poindexter. She never met Mama Alice, but I grew up knowing my great-grandparents and wanted to honor their memories.

On my way up to the Poindexter family reunion this weekend, I noticed a large stand of Ipomopsis rubra, or Standing Cypress flowers. These were Mama Alice's favorite wildflowers, and they always bloomed right around her birthday, so we always tried to stop alongside the road and pick a bouquet of them to take to her. We never knew their scientific name or anything, we just always called them Mama Alice Flowers.





Aren't they gorgeous? They're not terribly common and seem to prefer the poorer, rockier outcroppings... we don't always see them, but we love it when we do. I was glad all the way down to my toenails to see this batch on the highway north of Tishomingo, Oklahoma.