FROM THE LAB · FIELD NOTE · SEPTEMBER 15, 2026
In Search of Blue
Two blue flowers, six years apart
This morning, I noticed a tiny blue flower growing near the edge of the woods.
It was hiding underneath a shaded canopy of low green grass. I knew I had seen it before: two broad blue petals, a smaller pale petal below, and a tiny spray of yellow at the center.
There was something unmistakable about that blue—not quite cobalt, not quite violet, almost startling against all the green around it. I bent down and gently cradled it with my fingertips to photograph it.
I uploaded the photograph, curious to know what I had found.
A dayflower.
The name itself stopped me.
Dayflower.
One flower, one day. Each bloom opens in the morning and lasts for a single day.
Such an extravagant blue for such a brief appearance.
My brother Michael, a botanist, once told me that truly blue flowers are relatively uncommon in nature. Plants don’t actually produce a blue pigment; what we see as blue is created through a more complicated interplay of pigments, chemistry, and the structure of the flower itself.
Blue, it turns out, takes some doing.
And suddenly, standing there with this little blue flower cradled in my hand, I remembered something else.
I had gone searching for blue once before.
A flash from the side of the road.
It was May of 2020, about two months into COVID lockdown.
Dayflower, September 2026.
One day, while driving along I-40, I caught a flash of extraordinary blue along the roadside. I was moving too fast to see what it was—just a streak of color in the ditch bank.
Electric blue.
I told my brother about it. He wondered what I had seen. And because it was 2020, and the days had begun to feel strange and shapeless, the question took on considerably more importance than identifying a roadside wildflower would ordinarily warrant.
I decided to go find it.
The very next day.
I woke up the next morning, got into my car, and started driving down country roads, looking for this wildflower.
In fact, in my journal later on, I wrote:
“It’s a perfect day for wildflower hunting!”
And it was.
I drove down Borland Road, a winding, semi-shaded country road with patches of dappled sunlight. I passed Silver Apples Road—a name that had always made me wonder where such a road could possibly lead.
Eventually, I went down it.
It turned out to be a straight, narrow gravel road lined with tall pines. About a mile down I got slightly creeped out, performed a “12-point turn-around,” and came back.
I kept going.
Things found while looking for something else.
I bumped along country roads. I stopped for yellow flowers and wild daisies. I found enormous purple thistles. Somewhere along the way, I encountered two enormous gargoyles standing guard at the entrance to a country driveway.
I pulled over repeatedly and waded into ditch banks, checking first for snakes and roadkill like some kind of guerrilla nature photographer.
A lady police officer stopped to make sure I was okay.
A little while later, another woman pulled over to check on me.
Apparently, a middle-aged woman repeatedly abandoning her car and disappearing into roadside vegetation during lockdown raised questions. 😂
But I was fine.
I was looking for blue.
And I was rambling.
That’s the word I used then, too. Rambling through the countryside, rambling into my phone, and later onto the page. I had given myself a destination, but not a route.
Blue gave me something to follow.
Eventually, I gave up and headed home.
I turned onto my own road, but from the opposite end—the end I rarely traveled.
And there they were.
An expanse of blue wildflowers scattered through the grasses.
In my journal, I compared seeing them to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the world changes from black-and-white to color:
An expanse of electric blue.
I imagined running through them and lying down in the flowers like Dorothy in the poppy field.
Instead, I took a photograph.
And then, because I had accomplished my mission and I was tired, I went home and took a nap.
I didn’t know then what those flowers were.
Now I do.
Cornflowers.
Also called bachelor’s buttons.
And, yes:
Cornflower blue.
Finding that photograph again feels different now.
In 2020, the blue was something I was searching for. I had glimpsed it and lost it. The color pulled me out into the world.
It gave me somewhere to go at a time when so much of the world had nowhere to go. .
Cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus), also called bachelor’s buttons. May 2020.
The dayflower did almost the opposite.
I wasn’t looking for it.
It was simply there.
And because I happened to notice it, it stopped me.
The blue that returns
Then I found another photograph.
I had photographed a dayflower in 2020, too.
Dayflower (Commelina communis), 2020.
The same startling blue. The same two broad blue petals. The same tiny yellow structures suspended beneath them.
Six years apart; there they were.
There is something strange about encountering the same blue across time.
The flower itself is ephemeral. A dayflower bloom lasts only briefly.
But the blue returns.
Not the same flower.
Not the same day.
Not the same person looking at it.
And still—blue.
Maybe that's part of what makes color so interesting. Color belongs to the object, but it also belongs to the encounter. Light, eye, brain, memory, language, association: somewhere among all of these, blue happens.
Goethe was fascinated by this. His approach to color was concerned not only with light, but with what color does to the person seeing it. Blue, for him, held a peculiar quality of distance: it seemed to retreat from us even as it invited us to follow.
He wrote that blue “draws us after it.”
I understand that.
Because apparently blue has been pulling me down country roads for years.
Two blues
Now I keep thinking about these two flowers.
The dayflower, whose name contains its own impermanence.
The cornflower, whose blue became familiar enough that we turned the flower into a color name.
Dayflower blue.
Cornflower blue.
One arrived as an encounter.
One became a search.
One asked me to stop.
One asked me to go.
But perhaps those aren’t opposites after all.
They are movements of attention.
A few ways blue happens.
What we find
And then, that afternoon, I wondered about the dayflower.
Was it still there?
Would it look the same?
I knew it was a dayflower. I knew the bloom was fleeting.
But I had to go back and see.
Just to make sure.
I looked beneath the grasses where I had found it that morning.
Of course, it wasn’t there.
Dayflower.
And while I was looking for it, I found something else.
A rather perfect walnut heart.
Dayflower, 2020. Walnut heart, 2026.
I had gone looking for blue.
I found a heart.
There was something wonderfully familiar about this.
Because six years earlier, I had set out looking for one particular blue flower and spent hours finding everything else.
A road called Silver Apples.
Dappled sunlight.
Yellow flowers moving too much in the wind to photograph clearly.
Purple thistles.
A pair of enormous gargoyles guarding a country driveway.
A horse and two geese having what I described as “brunch al fresco.”
And somewhere among all of it, blue.
Maybe I didn’t need something to find that morning in 2020 as much as I needed something to notice.
The blue gave me a reason to go searching.
But the searching was the thing.
It moved my attention outward.
And six years later, another little blue flower appeared at the edge of the woods and the whole thing opened again.
I wasn’t looking for blue this time.
But there it was.
For a day.
Long enough to stop me.
Long enough to make me look.
And then, when I went looking for it again, I found a heart instead.
Maybe that's what happens when we let attention lead.
We don’t always find what we’re looking for.
We find what we see.
