I was having a tough time focusing on the pea blossoms.

I could see them through the viewfinder but, thanks to the sweat in my eyes, I couldn’t tell which blossom the camera was focusing on. To make matters worse, the sweat coming off my forehead was running through my eyebrow and into the camera’s eyepiece and those salty dribbles were making it hard to see if anything was in focus at all.

For the past two hours I had been driving slowly along with the air conditioner cranked against the 32C heat outside, cruising among the lush farm fields between High River and Milo. The crops all look amazing, the fields full of bright green wheat and barley, just-blooming carpets of canola and, here, tangles of field peas.

I hadn’t been stopping often to photograph them, though. The mid-afternoon sunlight was particularly harsh under that cloudless blue sky which, incongruously, made the fields look incredibly dull. Even the canola, bright, yellow and fresh as it was, was boringly bland.

The closest I had come to anything vibrant was a huge mat of algae on a pond near Brant. This particular pond had been nearly dry a few months ago but the wet spring had rejuvenated it — and the dormant algae as well — and now it was almost completely covered with mats of bright, acid green and fluorescent yellow.

True, it wasn’t much to look at from ground level but looking down on it through my little drone’s camera, it looked pretty cool. But then again, I am a sucker for random patterns.

Like the ones on wind-blown fields.

I love how barley and wheat look at this time of year when gusts of wind sweep across them. The stems are still pliable now with none of the stiffness that comes along as the grain ripens and the long whiskers of the bearded seed heads are more hair-like than the needles they become. The wind makes them dance.

The peas, sadly, just lie there. In among them there are some pretty nifty little curlicues formed by the vines and the new pods glow a translucent green when backlit by the sun. But overall, the fields are flat and uninteresting, too tangled for most animals to wander through and hard for even birds to hunt in.

So why was I parked and perspiring next to this pea field? It was because of the flowers.

Peas, like every other crop, have been bred to be uniform and predictable so they can be grown and harvested with confidence in the final product. As a result, pretty much every pea plant looks the same. Same leaves, same little vines, same pods and same pretty but bland white flowers.

But once in a while, a little ripple appears in the gene pool. And that’s what I had my lens aimed at.

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