the rhododendron flowers are all done. a few forlorn bees buzz around, making sure they haven’t missed anything.
on the side of the road, a smattering of asiatic dayflowers.
I’d wade into the weeds more, but the poison ivy threatens:
remember deertongue, from the other day? here’s how those wriggly spermies break free of the stalk:
let’s have another look at those teensy flowers:
fancy magenta headdress (stigma?)
...dangling little slippered feet (anthers?)
just so we’re clear about this, that whole structure takes up less than half the length of my index finger’s nail.
this is the last of the golden alexander that’s still golden...
most of it looks like this by now:
and now for today’s new (to me) species...drumroll please...
wild garlic!
the jack-in-the-pulpit report: still green.
...whereas the false solomon’s seal berries are partway to red. they don’t start off bright green like the jacks – more of a pale greeny yellow, followed by rusty speckling, like so:
some sort of panic grass. I am loathe to speculate on species – I’m not even completely sure it’s a panic grass.
OK, time to suck down some of the library books that have all been released from the purgatory of On Hold to my hot little hands, at the same time. Ready – set – go!
Howdy, folks! Sorry I disappeared on you for a bit there – my sister and I were helping my mom move. When I was first getting ready for this trip, I contemplated bringing various things with me: the camera. the work laptop... In the end, I brought neither, and a good thing too, since we were on the go from ~8:00 am every day until we collapsed, rigid and wired, into bed each night no earlier than 11 or midnight. Lordy.
There was a whole lot of this.
My sister and I are very different from my mom in a couple of ways that become very apparent during a move: neither one of us has much use for fashion, for one. I am, as I type this, wearing a t-shirt, track pants, and a flannel shirt ca 1991. My sister’s even more of an ascetic – she can’t abide buttons, for instance. My mom, on the other hand, has an extensive wardrobe featuring fabulous colors and textures, with more than one pair of shoes to match each outfit. She’s also got multiple sets of china and dinnerware, all of which she actually uses, and approximately eighty thousand wine glasses. She probably wonders where we came from.
I mention all of this by way of saying that despite the fact that I am a Simple Country Girl at heart, I am now the owner of two mink stoles and a full length Persian lamb coat. I couldn’t help myself – I got all sentimental: these have been in our family for decades. Where I’ll wear them is anyone’s guess. Probably not to the grocery store. I’d love to think of myself as eccentric, but I’m not that eccentric. Yet.
Another thing I am now the proud owner of is my grandmother’s botanical journal. Here’s just a preliminary sample of how she spent the summer of 1927, when she was twelve:
Wow. I guess I come by this fascination honestly, although it took longer to manifest with me. At age 12 I believe I had my nose in a book.
I got home yesterday afternoon and I’ve been busy recombobulating myself. Today was Reiki day at the hospital – that’s always restorative – and in the afternoon, Best Beloved and I set off for the mailbox. Here’s what we found.
Golden alexander (Zizia aurea)
Kevin proved to be a veritable jack-in-the-pulpit whisperer, conjuring up four separate flowers.
Check out those glossy leaves. Often, jacks don’t have flowers, and I can see how coming across their threesomes of leaves might make you wary that this is poison ivy.
This one’s encouraging, because it’s managed to come up from a swathe of gravel our neighbors dumped and smoothed on the banks of the stream in the wake of That Bitch Irene, who caused the stream to jump its banks and flood the meadow.
I found one on my own that hadn’t actually unfurled:
There was also this really cool, blond kind:
Kevin also scouted out some foamflower for me.
Tiarella cordifolia.
We have a stash of forget-me-nots (Myosotis sp.)
And some kind of grass in the lawn is flowering – same type that I found the syrphid fly on last week.
I’ve posted a lot about jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) lately. Why? Why not? It’s ORANGE, it’s got a goofy structure, it’s an antidote to poison ivy, and wait ‘til you see what happens when it goes to seed. (Hint: its other name is “touch-me-not”).
Open up and say “ahh”.
Stick out your tongue. This one is sadly blurry, but it shows how the side lower lips are stashed inside and just starting to emerge.
Trapeze artists. What are the chances of this happening?
All the way in, pal. There are other flowers in the world besides jewelweed…let’s have a look at ‘em.
As berries ripen, leaves fade. False solomon’s seal (Smilicina racemosa).
Golden alexander (Zizia aurea) seeds ripening.
Some kind of aster.
new species, new species!
The aptly-named turtlehead! (Chelone glabra)
cute, huh?
I finally caught the moment where Queen Anne’s Lace seeds are forming.
The styles are still attached. I’m going with whimsical berets.
How I wish I hadn’t procrastinated. These are all done and gone, and I’m still not sure what they were.
Mother nature loves her five-petaled yellow flowers – this one’s a fringed loosestrife (Lysimachia ciliata). new species! new species!
Bouncing bet, aka soapwort (Saponaria officinalis)
Finally, some meadowsweet (Spirea latifolia)
Yes, those are spider legs behind it. Feeling brave?
Hiya!
Just another day in paradise. Much to my annoyance, a milkweed along the side of our driveway that showed no signs of anything happening just three days ago, suddenly produced this while I wasn’t looking:
(That’s my delicate ladylike pinky finger there, which has been scientifically measured at 1/4” wide.) Later on, I found a different milkweed on our neighbor’s property that is just STUDDED with flowers – it did way better in the reproduction game than the ones in our driveway.
As you can see, several of the flowers seem to be busy with incipient pod-formation. I haven’t noticed anything that looks like a monarch caterpillar on the way, but I may not be looking for the right things or in the right places.
At this time of year, while new flowers do show up, there are plenty of old buddies to check in on.
Crowfoot (Ranunculus allegheniensis). This hasn’t really seemed to change much since the middle of June, when it looked like this. (As for the flower – click here for just two months ago.)
In the meantime, the False Solomon’s Seal berries are getting bigger, and still look gold from afar. But lovely and speckled up close.
White baneberry’s “doll’s eyes” berries are also ripening – in their case…
…to an eerie white.
Golden Alexander looks about the same as it did a month ago.
You wouldn’t know that, because apparently the last time I mentioned this flower here, it still had its petals. But trust me: all is ho hum in Golden Alexander land. Perhaps things are furiously happening under the surface.
But Ah! Much has changed with the roundleaved dogwood!
The stems have gone bright red! This made me laugh, as I wasn’t expecting it. That’s one of the virtues of being an amateur – everything surprises me. Although come to think of it, other kinds of dogwood also have a habit of red twigs. Still, though, I wasn’t expecting it. I will be expecting it, however, with that white baneberry.
Down by the road, the Eastern Joe-Pye Weed is going great guns.
Bees of many stripes are all over the emerging blossoms.
The cattails are going brown, generally from the top down.
…which makes sense, since it’s at the top of the what you see here that the male flower bits are divided from the female flower bits. The female flowers closest to the males apparently got fertilized sooner?
I noticed a new species today, maybe two, that are very similar.
In both kinds, the leaves are super divided and toothed – basically, really lacy leaves.
In both, all the flower action is in densely-studded racemes (that’s clusters of flowers along, and mostly at the end, of a stalk). In some of them, the flowers look like this:
Zooming in…little fuzzy capsules, jammed close together.
(Then I got distracted by this awesome fly – TINY – perched on the tip of one of these unopened flower sprays.)
Back to the flowers. I realized that in other examples, the flowers were more in a long spike, ranged evenly along the flower stalk.
(Whoops, blurry. It’s my only shot at this perspective, though.)
I maneuvered the camera to get a look up into these little flower bits – they’re open on the underside.
oh, WOW.
Some of these are…fertilized, I guess.
Honestly, just when I thought I’d seen it all, some new plant wanders in with a completely new way of doing things. This is crazy. You have to understand, each little green cap is maybe…at most, 1/16” of an inch across. I have NO CLUE what this/these plants are.
In other exciting news, I filmed a sleeping (presumably) caterpillar. Did you know they sort of breathe? I mean, sort of, in that they don’t have lungs, really. They have little holes along their sides called spiracles, and they expand and contract their segments to force air in and out. I guess that counts as breathing, right? Anyway, this guy was hanging out on the edge of the table we have in our magic portable screened in porch.
If you can stand 42 seconds of thrilling excitement, watch him (her?) breathe.
Once you’ve watched a caterpillar stirring in its dreams, you kind of tend to take an interest in the little bugger. According to the angels at bugguide.net, this is a Heterocampa guttivitta, and according to wiki.bugwood.org, whose pictures appear below, it goes through a bunch of stages (“instars”) before arriving at its ultimate Basic Gray Moth destiny.
Who knew that just becoming a moth was so complicated? Maybe I should cut myself some slack for all the various twists and turns my own life has taken.
