Here's to our colorful May flowers

Pristine rose / The beauty of our May flowers

It's the first week of May and our backyard garden has started to bloom. Lots of colors -- orange, white, pink, red, purple.

Mr. Lincoln red rose

Looking back, the April showers we enjoyed here in the San Francisco Bay Area, indeed, brought an abundance of May flowers to our garden. Our Queen Elizabeth, First Prize and Pristine roses are blooming very nicely. The same for our Mr. Lincoln, white, orange and rainbow-colored roses. Just the other day, I witnessed our first All That Jazz bloom of the season  -- a lovely shade of red.

And, let's not forget that this is the time of the year our purple irises are blooming, too.

For most of us, flowers are an important part of our every-day lives. They have the ability to make us happy and cheerful. And, we offer our friends and loved ones flowers as a means of showing our sympathy.

Different types of flowers can express different kinds of feelings and emotions, from birthdays to graduations to weddings to funerals.

Queen Elizabeth roses

One thing's for sure: May flowers are a wonderful sight to behold -- and, I would would like to share with you a few of our May roses, which I photographed during the first few days of May.

Finally, let me leave you with this thought about flowers that's just as meaningful now in the 21st century as it was when it was written near the end of the 18th century:

"'Tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes!"

-- William Wordsworth, "Lines Written in Early Spring"

From Lyrical Ballads (1798)