I spent this spring hiking along the upper and lower Hulls Gulch trails in Camel’s Back Park / Ridge to Rivers.

I saw many new flowers (including two new blue ones).

One of my favorite new flowers this spring was this gorgeous larkspur.

It is one of the purest blue flowers I’ve ever seen. It might even rival the alpine forget-me-not, which I am slightly in love with.

An old favorite of mine — the large-flowered triplet lily — was out everywhere.

Since it is almost blue, this made me very happy.

Here it is with some arrowleaf balsamroot, another perennial favorite.

Another flower that was up everywhere is longleaf fleabane.

This particular flower had a yellow spider camouflaged on its yellow center — hoping to catch a wayward insect — but it hid under the blossom when I bent down to take a picture.

It also just wouldn’t be spring without some lupine. Here is some longspur lupine (my favorite lupine).

I love that the flowers are both purple and yellow.

There were some wild blackberry flowers out.

You can sort of see one berry emerging from the middle bud.

One of my favorite flowers this spring was this Nevada pea.

The blossoms were reminiscent of a jellyfish — all translucence.

I walked past a large patch of them. Then thousands of sheep were herded through the Boise foothills, and they were no more.

The sheep ate all the Nevada pea and larkspur even though larkspur is poisonous. They even ate some button-stage mushrooms that I was waiting to see if were the deadly poisonous destroying angel or not.

I saw two other blue flowers.

Here is the one — some blue lupine.

Most of the lupine plants around Hulls Gulch were eaten by the sheep as well as far as I can tell.

Here is the other — the blossoms are absurdly tiny.

It is a non-native species called strict forget-me-not, originally from Eurasia.

Here is another flower I saw everywhere this spring.  It is minuscule and I can’t find it in any of my wildflower guides. I have six guides for this area, so this is not for lack of trying.

It looks like tiny bells and has a single, enormous seed. I’ve looked in some guides two or three times at this point. I don’t know if I can’t find it because it’s unusual or if it’s simply invasive.

A few other new species I saw (but that I won’t show here) were Columbia puccoon, miner’s lettuce, and Oregon checkermallow.

I also saw several old species like Aase’s onion, Pursh’s milkvetch, sagebrush buttercup, and prairie flax.