nap faeries: 1 me: 0; also, raspberry flower development

Yesterday’s b-day party for The Dude, Who Abideth, was lovely. It rained, and thus we all crammed inside the magic portable screened in porch. What is the ideal number of chairs for a party? Let x = number of guests. Answer? x – 1. There was much hilarity and merriment, and then everybody went home, except for my old friend Jake, who crashed in the batcave Reiki room cat napping room and left this morning.
This afternoon the nap faeries sucker-punched me and I was out for three hours.
I dragged myself outside in the late afternoon – force of habit. Here’s the report:

Foxglove (Digitalis) struggling under the watchful eye of the black raspberries and bur cucumber invaders.

More fun with emerging spiderworts. Isn’t he a handsome fellow?
And now: raspberry flowers. I find these astonishing. Some of these are blurrier than I would like, but because the overall narrative is SO FREAKING cool you’re just going to have to put up with it.

The flowers start off as grumbly little burs.

They start to open up.

These white-ish things are…I’m pretty sure, at any rate, the anthers. Disclaimer: I’m no botanist. But let’s go with anthers for right now. They gradually pull away from the center, revealing…

…the stigma, in the center. This one’s blurry, sorry! Also, the petal color hasn’t actually changed that much. I’ve found that on overcast days, my camera washes out certain colors. Haven’t debugged that yet.

OK, skipping forward, by now the petals have fallen off completely. Those white triangles are the sepals that used to enclose the whole package – they’re still all prickly on the reverse side. The stamens have turned purple, which is insane.

And here, we can see that many of the stigma – the bits in the center – have been fertilized, cause you can see the very beginnings of tasty fruit forming.
Trippy!