Now we are just haggling over the price.

Scrounging for floral color here.

Pale smartweed: it tiny.


Fall dandelion: arrives late to the party, but brings awesomeness. [Editor's note: I lied. It's Cat's Ear. Still awesome, though.]


Common evening primrose.


Ditto, having gone to seed.
Speaking of going to seed, remember the gentian that I was worried about earlier? No? Here, I’ll remind you. Here’s the time-lapse sequence:

August 20: delicious	August 31: sheer voluptuousness
September 16: going over the hill	September 24: yuck

I was worried about these because they seemed to be moldering away without having had a chance to open up. Turns out this is most likely Gentiana clausa – aka, “closed gentian”. How they manage to do their business is anyone’s guess. Presumably small intrepid insects are involved. At any rate, here’s what it looks like as of today:

Those flowers are PACKED with seeds; to wit:


Flowers that rely on windborne dispersal are going great gang-busters, which kinda makes sense, since a lot of birds have packed up and left for the season. Now, that’s the sort of reckless statement that deserves actual study to back it up. I’ll put it on the list for next year, I suppose. At any rate, here are a few of my favorites from today:

Tall anemone (thimbleweed). My head is exploding!


Rats, I’m not sure what this is.


Milkweed: proof that starting to lose your mind can be beautiful.
And now, for more milkweed pørn*.



*Yes, I just spent five minutes figuring out how to make a slashed zero, rather than spell it out, since that word generates a lot of blog traffic: users the world over end up here, looking for --- oh, nasty stuff. Imagine their surprise when they find me, instead. I could keep using That Word to up my ranking in Nature Blog Network, but that would make me a whore**.
**Ooops.