Sample Descriptive Paragraph

Students, please find below an example of a descriptive paragraph of the type noted during lectures and here.  It does not address any specific prompt directly, other than to present an example of a descriptive paragraph.

In the Texas Hill Country, early spring is wildflower season.  In years when the rains have come, the sides and medians of roads and highways, the banks of rivers, and the few places where grass grows freely between the scrubby oaks and cedars upon the limestone hills where the coastal plains rise up into the Edwards Plateau explode into a riot of glorious color.  Reds, golds, oranges, and the lusciously white-capped blues of the Texas bluebonnet erupt almost overnight from the green places.  In the early morning hours, as the sun rises and shades the partly cloudy sky with royal purples and golds, noble reds, festive pinks, and a thousands hues of blue, those many people already upon the long and well loved roads in the open spaces that still remain between the sprawling cities see that the narrow ribbons of smooth asphalt upon which they race from place to place become bridges amidst the heavens themselves.  For the abundance and density of colors among the plants upon which the new-risen sun shines are mirrored only in the lightening morning sky--and in the dying evening, when the sun retires in splendor, and again the boundaries between the earth and sky are blurred as the eye follows the flower-bordered road off into the distance.

Sample Descriptive Paragraph

The paragraph below answers the prompt "Describe your favorite thing in such a way as to indicate that it is your favorite."

My favorite thing is my bookshelf at home.  It is not a single construct, but a composite, built of several store-bought shelving units in white particle board and several more lengths of planking held to the wall by brackets.  I built the planking-shelves with my own hands years ago in cascades of sweet-smelling sawdust amidst the cries of saw blades and exultations of drill bits.  Both store-bought and hand-made shelves swell with the weight of hundreds of thousands of pages of books, collecting the wisdom and delight of centuries of the written word in English and other languages.  Although they remain fast to the wall and rooted to the floor, my bookshelves open many doors, their solid frames giving way to winds fragrant with old ink and the pencil-scrawled comments of generations of readers.  The gentle creaking of their boards as books enter and leave them bespeaks the ancientry of that of which they tell, rooting me in history even as the shelves are fixed and fixtures in my home, the focal point to which my guests' eyes are directed, and the source of what I am able to do in the work I love.