Flower porn: Cotton

Stages in the life of a cotton flower in my back yard. Then it gets progressively deeper rust color and shrivels up, and the bole forms, where the cotton is created, and it eventually hangs down like icicles.

We watch hummingbirds, bushtits, and orioles gather it to line their nests, and from time to time we find a nest, a scaffolding of twigs filled with cotton. They look snug. Of course, birds are born wearing down comforters, but they still gather cotton for their mattresses.

I think this is a Pima cotton (Gossypium barbadense), except it's not supposed to grow here, and this one has done so for decades. If not Pima cotton, it's some other Gossupium. It grows about 10 or 12 feet high. It's a small, multi-trunked tree or a big shrub. My aged mom, who picked cotton as a child and teenager in Texas, says it looks just like the cotton she picked, except that was thigh-high and had white flowers, but the flower bud (she called it a "patch"), bole, cotton, and leaf were as she remembered them.

It grows from seed, and I'd be willing to mail seeds to people who would like to coddle their hummingbirds if they sent a request at cdrealist@gmail.com.

I also kind of wish I could find a local spinner who could use a couple of gallon bags full of un-seeded long-fiber cotton that has never seen a chemical, but I've never found anybody interested in using it, so it becomes mulch.