There’s a drainage ditch runs alongside the rail trail where we often take our morning stroll.

It runs with water after rain and provides an excellent damp environment for the cardinal flower (lobelia cardinalis). It’s a showy deep red spiky flower native to the US.

Apparently most insects find it difficult to navigate the long tubular flowers so the cardinal depends on hummingbirds for pollination. On this particular stretch of the rail trail they start showing up in late July and are still going strong.

Some mornings the light slants through gaps in the undergrowth on the bank and the flower is highlighted like a beacon.

And that always makes me think of Wordsworth and the Lucy poems and particularly “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” where Lucy, like the smallest and insignificant flower – in his case a violet by a mossy stone – stands out and that makes all the difference.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

                                     – William Wordsworth

This photo from Innisfree Garden in spring has  violet and moss but not a violet. 

And one more from the rail trail in August: