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You are here: Home / Garden Chats / Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Appreciating the Evanescent

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Appreciating the Evanescent

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frost flower - sunrise

Fleeting miracles, from the gifted (in every sense) Ozark Hillbilly:

Last year, conditions never managed to come together for us, but in the first week of November we had 2 1/2 days of soaking rain followed by temperatures dropping to 18 degrees on the morning of the 7th. Being a betting man I grabbed my camera and headed for the creek bottoms, high in expectations of a superbloom. I was not disappointed.

frost flowers - wow

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Appreciating the Evanescent 1

From the first rays of the sun peaking over the hill tops till I was just plain and simply ODing on it all, was about an hour and half, during which I took 173 pictures in 3 different locations ending up along the roadsides of Hwy 185 outside of Meramec State Park. Of the dozens of cars that drove past me while there only 1 stopped to see what I was doing and even tho he had a camera he hadn’t taken a single frost flower picture, choosing to spend his morning photographing one of our local bald eagles instead. The rest probably thought, “WTF is that idiot doing crawling around in the litter along side the road?” Other than the one guy, nobody else even bothered slowing down.

frost flowers smooth operator

I find frost flowers wondrous to behold,each one a unique and stunning expression of natures endless works. As with so much on our home planet, indeed Mother Earth herself, they are oh so fragile and only here for a very short while. Every time I see them I know I have been blessed all over again.


frost flowers - striated

In “Striated”, if one looks closely one can see water droplets at the leading edge of the ice curl in the center of the picture indicating that while the temp is still well below freezing, the morning sun has already begun working their inevitable demise.

I added the last pick of the roadside [below] just so people who have never seen them can get an idea of what it looks like from the window of a passing vehicle.

frost flowers roadside view

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    spudgun

    Wow, I’ve never heard of frost flowers before – they’re beautiful!

     

    Thank you for documenting these, OH – you’ve got mad skills with a camera…?

  2. 2.

    WhatsMyNym

    It’s been years since I’ve seen any.  You’ve done an incredible job capturing them in these photos.

  9. 9.

    Martin

    I’ve seen frost flowers a few times before, but never as nice as those. Great job chasing those down.

  11. 11.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @opiejeanne:   Those aren’t frost flowers, which come out of the stems of grass and other dead reedy plants but a different type of freeze phenomenon where the ice is extruded directly from the ground. For lack of better terms I call them “frost fungi” because to me they are reminiscent of coral fungi. I actually took a bunch of pictures of that last winter and was planning on sending them in to Anne at some point this winter. Your frost fungi in that pic are far more… Beautiful? Photogenic? than any of the ones I took pics of. You should send them in to Anne for a garden chat.

  13. 13.

    WereBear

    Thanks so much OH, these are lovely!

     

    As a follower of the Tao, I recently formulated this for myself, but this is a perfect place to share it.

     

    Living in the Now isn’t about a five second attention span. It means not trying to live in the past as though that is something we can go back to. It means not trying to live in the future before it comes.

    We choose paths informed by the past. We take actions mindful of the future. But it is in the moment that we take each step.

    We are only alive and awake in the Now. Because this is when, moment by moment, the Path supports our weight.

  15. 15.

    opiejeanne

    @OzarkHillbilly: Thanks. My pictures of the frost fungi are from several years ago.  When I first saw them I thought they were little mushrooms, until I got close enough to get a good look.  They all sprouted out of a mole hill that the mole had backfilled sometime earlier.

     

    The other picture with the spiky frost things were on flat leaves, IIRC.

  16. 16.

    Mary G

    I’m another one who’s never even heard of frost flowers. They are exquisite. Thank you so much for the introduction, OH.

  17. 17.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @opiejeanne:  

    The other picture with the spiky frost things were on flat leaves, IIRC

    Your other link goes to a picture of a frozen lake so, sadly, I haven’t seen the spiky frosty things yet.

  18. 18.

    Sab

    6 a.m. here. Those frost flowers are lovely.

    We are having a sudden warm spell , so I have my bedroom window open and my favorite cat is on the window sill smelling the outside air. He is (was)  a semi-feral rescue. He has no intention of ever stepping outside again, but he does love to sniff outside air.

  21. 21.

    Sab

    We have a Maine coon cat who is not a climber. Yesterday he was working his way across the room from one piece of furniture to another. I heard a “whomf” sound, and he disappeared. After about ten minutes I went to check on him. (We have an indoor recycling bin that used to be a tall laundry basket. Now it is lined with a blue recycling bag, and we dump all of our recycleables into it, and periodically take it/them to the outside dumster bin.) Anyway, our cat travelling across the room on furniture got to the recycling bin, saw the cardboard on top, and thought it was a box. He was wrong. It couldn’t sustain his weight. So when he tried to walk on it, it gave way. The “whomf” sound we heard was him falling to the bottom of the bin. He didn’t complain. He just sat there. After about ten minutes I went to check on the disappeared cat. I found him sitting at the bottom of the bin. My husband joked that he would tear my face off if I pulled him out of where he had landed, but he was very happy to be rescued.

  22. 22.

    MazeDancer

    Like others, had never heard of frost flowers, so how wonderful my introduction could be with such exquisite pictures.

     

    Many thanks, @OzarkHillbilly!

  23. 23.

    OzarkHillbilly

    When I was younger I didn’t have much appreciation for musicals, but these days…. Cats. I’m gonna have to go see this one.

  24. 24.

    Raven

    72 but pretty stiff winds so I’m not sure I’ll be able to hold the bottom. It is going to rain fo a bit so I’ll drag my shit down to the water for one last day.

  29. 29.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:   Heh. It took me awhile to catch on. I need more coffee I guess.

    In my attempts to quit smoking my wife and I tried a hypnotist. We’re leaning back in chairs with our eyes closed and he’s talking about this calming smooth cool blue fluid filling up our bodies, starting at our feet and moving up our legs, now at our knees, now halfway up our thighs, now at our pelvis….

    “I’m being embalmed.” was all I could think.

    Needless to say it didn’t work for me. It did for my wife, she went a month without touching a cigarette. And then in discussing why it worked for her and not for me… I told her of my embalming experience.

    She laughed her ass off. Then she started smoking again.

  33. 33.

    JMG

    We have been downgraded in suburban Boston to Winter Weather Advisory, which is Weather Service for “only a moderate shitstorm.” Forecast is for between 3 and 11 inches of snow, which is not exceptionally helpful. Got to clean out the garage so we can put the car in and if there’s time, rake some leaves that have piled up against one side of the house. We won’t be seeing the yard until April is my guess. Oh, well, it’s not like I expected a San Diego winter.

  36. 36.

    debbie

    @OzarkHillbilly:
    These are seriously the best photos of frost flowers I have ever seen (that one that looks like ribbon candy may be my favorite)! I don’t remember what they’re called but we get wind-made giant snow balls after a windy snowstorm. My Mamaw told me that angels liked playing in the snow as much as we did.

    You need to submit these somewhere.

  40. 40.

    ANdrew

    As someone who grew up in Australia and yet spent years in cold climates I totally LOVE that someone notices and gets excited enough about cold weather weird stuff, to share. Thanks I will look for them in future if I ever get back to a cold climate I’m totally going to look for these!

  41. 41.

    chris

    Cool pix, OH! I don’t know if I’ve never seen or just never noticed frost flowers. I’ll have to pay more attention.

    (Hmm, no Visual/Text choice in comments this AM?)

     

    (ETA: And there it is! After I posted the comment.)

  43. 43.

    J R in WV

    Wonderful photos of a briefly appearing beautiful natural phenomenon. We get what you called frost fungi pretty often, but I haven’t seen frost flowers from stems and surface things like that.

    Beautiful ~!!~ Thanks so much. I may recall you posting another set of frost flower photos way back? This set seems better, somehow.

  48. 48.

    J R in WV

    Hey, Ozark… what kind of camera are you using now for these photos?

     

    Just curious, always like to see what guys use for their photography. So often today it’s “Just my cellphone, dude!” proving that the best camera is the one you have with you.

  51. 51.

    OzarkHillbilly

    To all, for all the compliments I’d say “Thanx” but in truth I can’t claim much credit. While it is possible to take a better photo of a frost flower, and some will obviously be reaching into that “best” category, it is all but impossible to take a bad photograph of a frost flower. Unless you forget to take the lens cap off. It took me several hours over 3 days to winnow the 173 I took down to the set I sent Anne and several got left behind that I felt deserved being seen.

    JR, you are correct, Anne ran some I sent her 2 or 3 years ago. I suspect that this set seems better because they are the ones in front of your eyes.

    FFs can be difficult to find. I have gone years without seeing them. Sometimes because conditions were never quite right for them (last year was one such). Other times because my schedule was too inflexible for me to search them out when conditions seemed ripe.

    It takes a period of wet weather to fully saturate the ground (2 1/2 days of steady rain did the trick this year) followed by a night of sustained below freezing temps (the length of time below 32 determines the size and extravagance of the flowers) while the ground is still soaked but not yet frozen. As the water in the stems freezes it is squeezed out cracks in the stem. As the ice expands out it pulls fresh water up the stem till it too freezes, and the cycle continues till the sun comes up. I always look for a mowed field or roadside as the blades of the mower fracture the stems which makes for the most extravagant FFs. I once found some as big as dinner plates. It got cold and then clouded up before the sun rose so that it stayed well below freezing not just all night but half the day too.

    The last requirement is a willingness to get up well before the sun and get out looking for them in the gray light of dawn. Once the sun hits the FFs, their fate is sealed. Because the temp was down to 18, these lasted longer than I expected. I have seen them disappear in as little as 5 or 10 mins at temps above 25.

  53. 53.

    NotMax

    Holiday programming note:

    Only chance this month to see (or record for later viewing) the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol on TCM is today at 3 p.m. Eastern time.

  55. 55.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Ozark Hillbilly, absolutely fantastic!   Such delicate beauty.  This is something that the odious slime that is every political appointee of Donald Trump cannot appreciate.

  56. 56.

    bemused

    Sun coming out of the clouds on our MN winter wonderland this morning. Snow, snow, snow all night long. There was no traffic on our state highway and snowplows didn’t start plowing until about 6 am.

  57. 57.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @J R in WV:   It’s just an old Olympus SP-500UZ my wife bought for me. It’s only 6 megapixels but it has a 10X zoom and it does shoot macro and has settings for aperture preferred, shutter speed preferred, and auto as well as other functions I’ve never bothered with. They were selling add on lenses (I got the wide angle). I don’t know if they still are.

    In another life I took photography seriously to the point of having 3 different OM-1 bodies, 7 lenses, a couple tripods, and thousands of Kodachrome slides. I lost all that in divorce and seeing as it was an expensive hobby and I was a divorced father of 2 sons making child support payments etc etc etc, I gave it up. Every now and again I feel the urge to take it up again (much cheaper now with digital) and start looking at cameras and lenses…. and the prices…. And I realize that for my style of photography this little camera does just fine about 90% of the time.

    At some point in time I will upgrade, at the very least to something with more pixels, but my focus has always been more on subject matter and the lighting and framing of it, than all the other stuff.

  59. 59.

    Denali

    Dear Ozark Hillbilly,

    I love being introduced to a Totally New Thing. The frost fungi photos are amazing. To think, up here in frozen upstate New York, I have never seen them- although I have photos of some wicked icicles hanging from my upstair window!

  60. 60.

    bemused

    @NotMax:

     

    It is beautiful out there but then there is the shoveling/plowing out. My spouse just started that project which will take a couple of hours at our country home.

  62. 62.

    Miss Bianca

    I’m tending the upstairs fire, cursing all things winter (waking up to room temperatures below 60 degrees always makes me grumpy), then I see these. OH, I’ll join my accolades to everyone else’s: truly exquisite photos. Thank you!

  63. 63.

    Joy in FL

    Florida native here. I had no idea these even existed. Thank you for the wonderfully detailed photos and a whole new part of my brain : )

  64. 64.

    Aleta

    OH and Ojeanne, thanks for explaining about the different origins — hollow grasses vs the ground.  A  different level for me of understanding them.

     

    OH, are there structures of ice or frost that form in caves  because of some kind of rare conditions there (different shapes than we’re used to)?  I’d like seeing more of any of your photos of frozen states of water.

  68. 68.

    Origuy

    I’d never heard of frost flowers either. There’s another interesting ice formation that forms at high altitudes called penitentes. They’re thin blades of ice that align with the sun. They form in the Andes; the Spanish thought they looked like the procession of penitents during Holy Week.

  69. 69.

    Madeleine

    Thank you OH. You introduced me to frost flowers with the photos a couple years ago. I was delighted to see more–such evanescent loveliness.

  71. 71.

    sgrAstar

    Wowza! Like a lot of my fellow Juicers, I’ve never heard of frost flowers before. They are sensational. Thanks!

    ?

  72. 72.

    bemused

    @NotMax:

    No doubt!

    10″ snow at our house, 19″ in Duluth suburb and close to 24″ in Grand Rapids. Bet you don’t miss these snow events.

  73. 73.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @opiejeanne:   Way late , but I’ll leave this hear anyway. That is called hoarfrost. It occurs when there is a lot of moisture in the air and temps drop below freezing, such as when there is freezing fog. I have only witnessed it once in my life. Truly magical stuff.

  74. 74.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Aleta:

    are there structures of ice or frost that form in caves because of some kind of rare conditions there

    There are some truly weird formations underground but water freezes below ground in the same many and varied ways it does above ground. Tho, no reedy type plants or grass underground so no frost flowers.

  75. 75.

    dnfree

    Exquisite!  Thanks for brightening the day.

    In northern Illinois I have never seen frost flowers, but we have hoarfrost usually several times a winter and it is always something to enjoy “in the bleak midwinter”.

  76. 76.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @dnfree:

    but we have hoarfrost usually several times a winter

    I am jealous. The one time I experienced it was on a winter float trip on a spring fed river when the night time temps dropped below -10 degrees. The next morning I awoke to the sound of ice floating down stream grating on ice growing out from the stream banks. The water was a shade of turquoise I had never seen before and the mist rising off the river made such delicate formations…

    We had slept in a cave that night and I managed to snap off about half a dozen pics before the shutter froze up.

    The pics are all gone to the Gods of divorce except for the ones I have in my head.

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