Flowers along Highway 12

I was always amazed and impressed by the profusion of wild flowers every Spring when we were in the North. Of course, here in the desert of the South, there are simply nowhere near as many plants of any kind since we get so little rain. However, there still ARE some very lovely wildflowers, particularly along highway 12.

There's a place on highway 12 a little south of the Uvda airport where, for no apparent reason, there are wider shoulders on the road and places not quite opposite each other on both sides where there are short curbs with a bit of sidewalk, just like where there are bus stops, except there are NO bus stops here and no obvious reason why there every WOULD be! David and I refer to this as "the wide place in the road".

Since this is along the route that we call "the short loop" (up highway 90 to highway 40, then over and down highway 12 back to Eilat), we drive by this place quite often. Last week, I stopped at the wide place in the road and snapped these pictures.

This plant you see in the first couple of photos is the most obvious when you're whizzing along the highway. The flowers are a kind of coral pink and very noticeable. There are also LOTS of these nearly everywhere in the Uvda area in the drainage ditches on both sides of the road. In English, these would probably be called dock, or dock weed:

Here's a more close-up view of a different bunch of them:

Upon closer inspection, one discovers that there are actually several kinds of flowers. Here we see some small purplish white ones:

These are nearly pure white and are VERY small:

I've never seen flowers quite like these before. They are tiny yellow balls, about a centimeter in diameter:

These are also yellow and quite small, but they look something like cornflowers to me:

I took all these photos with the standard camera app on my iPhone 4S. Of course, I did crop them, and I also scaled their size so that the files wouldn't be inordinately large for uploading and viewing. Other than that, they are unedited.