It's hard for me to imagine a hardier bloomer than the hardy cyclamens I have growing in my garden. These little charmers have, so far, withstood snow, drought, sleet, and deep cold, with the temperature nudging six degrees recently. And still, from around mid-October, they've rewarded our nurturing—not, I suppose, that they needed any help from us—with a steady stream of variegated leaves and gentle, unassuming flowers that appeared out of nowhere from reawakened corms underground. I guess they're on their last legs... they have to be on their last legs, at least in the blossom department, but I was able to capture what appears to be their floral finale with an ancient Vivitar macro zoom that I had almost forgotten I had. The lens, from the 60s, is completely manual, so I had to dig deep into my fading neurons to retrieve muscle memory that enabled manual focusing and metering. Fortunately, at least a few brain cells still work.