lawn ornaments, monkey faces, and drunk bees

As if yesterday’s fabulous developments weren’t enough, last night was the first time we heard the spring peepers out on the pond. I can think of few sounds more thrilling to the soul than their song: they mean that without a doubt, spring is here. I may work on getting my own personal audio, rather than subject you to (gasp!) other people’s.
Today’s developments! Outtanowhere, we have some additional lawn ornaments. No, no pink flamingos, no crystal balls, no garden gnomes: we have beautiful flowers, randomly arranged at the edges of the lawn, thanks be to previous owners who apparently “garden”, this mysterious activity I’ve heard of:

These seem close to being a kind of blue-eyed grass, but for a variety of reasons I won’t bore you with unless you want to get all geeky with me offline, they don’t exactly fit the bill. The flowers are pretty big, for one thing – over an inch wide.

…unlike this kind, barely a half-inch wide.

Plus, we have a so-far lone miniature hyacinth


The daylilies continue to unfold.


You said something about monkey faces?

To plagiarize my own blog, this is Juglans cinerea – butternut, aka white walnut. Look at the leaf scar – the little monkey face. The dots and the smiley face are the cross section of veins that went into the stem of a leaf that has since fallen away. I’d last seen this out on the main road (or, what passes for a main road around here) but THIS guy is in our OWN SIDE YARD, just a few feet away from the mongo yellow birch that I love to stare at from the comfy chair upstairs. OH HAPPY DAY!

This is the mystery plant from yesterday – more of the flowers have opened up. I no longer believe it’s Empetrum atropurpureum, because the pictures I’ve found of that species online look way too….heathy. The leaves look kind of stubbier and sturdier than the delicate leaves of what’s growing here. So I am sans clue, alas.
As for the flowers, this will be WAY too much info for some of y’all, but I’m thinking, “playtex plastic tampon applicator” here.

You know I’m right.

OKAY, we just lost any boys who might have been reading this. Let’s keep the ball rolling by looking at the boy parts of the gray birch, as of today – if you’re new here, puh-leeze, go look at yesterday’s post – I’ve been keeping an eye on this.:

 

The catkins are really starting to open up, yeah? It’s only now that I realize my camera settings were dialed way down today so that I could send the concrete guy pictures of the newly-restained concrete floor without overloading his email with ginormous files. Mea culpa. (That’s another post.)
OK, I’ll leave you with one last story:

Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!

(They are actually two different flowers, and two different Um Bees I Guess.)