spot the bugs

Day lily leaves, showing how the weather’s been lately. Hey, does anyone else remember print ads for Bausch and Lomb contact lenses from the ‘80’s?
Ode to a Dandelion, Part Deux:

And yesterday’s patch of coltsfoot…

…today, almost every one of these is a dirty gray puffball. I missed it! Rats! I guess it happens pretty quickly.
Other flowers open more slowly, so we can enjoy ‘em at our leisure. To wit: the lilacs.

The apple trees in our yard are starting to open up.  When I visited my friend Craig over the weekend – here’s another shameless plug for Half Crown Hill Orchard – he and his wife explained how apples generate a cluster bomb of five buds at a go, with the “king” blossom in the center. They might not have used the phrase “cluster bomb” – that sounds like something I might have made up. I’d never noticed that before, so imagine my delight when I saw this:



Still no luck identifying Random Lawn Weed:

Thin, skinny, alternating leaves; behaves kind of like a vine. Anybody have a clue?

And now for something truly exciting. I think I may have found some wild ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) today. Or possibly red baneberry (Actaea rubra). It’s exciting – well, it’s exciting to me, either way – but it’s theoretically additionally exciting if it’s ginseng, as mean people have been known to poach ginseng for sale on the herbal market.

Ignore the sensitive fern at lower left. (It won’t mind, despite its name. That’s actually its name – “sensitive fern”). What you want to see here is – one long stalk, that splits into three, with compound (more-than-one-leaf-per-stem) leaves on each of the three stems. And you also want to notice the separate stalk, coming up seemingly from at-or-below-ground-level, that similarly splits three ways, with a cluster of flowers at the tip of each one.

Here’s the flower stalk action.

Cute, eh?

I tried and failed to get a look at the emerging flower.
[Editor's Note: this is probably actually wild sarsaparilla - Aralia nudicaulis)

Oh, we’re not NEARLY done yet. Let’s have a look at fern naughty bits spores.

The solomon’s seal flowers are finally finally finally starting to pop.


Here’s some more on the decline and fall of the magnolia blossoms (sob!)


Just in time for the azalea nearby to start blooming:

And now for the macabre. Have you been watching for bugs so far, in this post? Because there have been three so far. This next one is hard to miss. We’re on a fern.

She’s embalming her victim in a cocoon. Don’t believe me?

*slurp.*

Moving right along!

We have a great boulder on the edge of the lawn. It’s a whole planet unto itself.

I keep spotting new jack-in-the-pulpits. I’m just as thrilled as I was the first time I ever saw one. I mean, who INVENTS this stuff?



Miterwort (Mitella dyphilla). These are hard to photograph – they’re TINY (maybe at most a quarter inch wide?) and, the mosquitos are out in this spot of the woods. I make a lot of sacrifices for this blog…I sure hope y’all appreciate it.
As for the bugs…here they are (minus the dining spider)…

sorry for the delay

On Thursday night, Blogger was down, meaning I couldn't publish one of my usual scintillating posts replete with close-ups of flowers and what not. Grrr! (I'll post it tomorrow.)

On Friday, I caught a flight to Pittsburgh for the half marathon I've been training for the past few months. On the shuttle bus from the parking lot, I ran into the friend of a friend who was the first person to turn me on to Born to Run.  I figured that was some good karma. She gave me some good tips on running in the rain. It involves anti-chafing strategies. I'll leave the details to your imagination. I let her know that it was a conversation with her that had inspired me to sign up for my first half marathon last year, cause I figure we all appreciate knowing that we had an impact on one another, don't you think? We exchanged hugs and went our separate ways.

On Saturday, I visited my high school buddy Craig and his beautiful family. They run Half Crown Hill Orchard and we wandered around the property for a while, enjoying the gorgeous weather.

The property has been in Craig's family for years. I remember ice skating on a pond there back in high school. For a while, Craig's life took him to other places, but at some point a few years ago, he and his wife Suzan settled on the old homestead and got busy planting an orchard. Then they got busy with other pursuits, and the result is a 16-month old girl who is due for her first tractor-driving lesson any day now. You think I'm kidding. I'm probably not.

I missed the apple trees' flower season, unfortunately, but that only means I get to show you what wee baby apples look like - when they're so tiny, you can still see flower bits on their bottom ends.

The property also features a huge stand of aspen...

...and an equally impressive grove of wild-sown dogwood and honeysuckle. I wish I could attach the smell to this post, so you could breathe in the springtime sweetness. And I promise an allergy-free experience.

 You're just dying to see a close-up of a dogwood flower, right?

Here you go.

Honeysuckle. There was more than one kind. 

Eventually, I made my way home, and got myself into bed bright and early so that I could be sure to get some sleep before my 4:30 am wake-up call. No sooner were the lights out than my cell rang - another high school friend, and my ride to the race the following morning, was calling to let me know he'd pulled his hamstring playing a soccer game and would most likely not be able to run the race. Uh oh. But he assured me that his running buddy would give me a ride. So far so good.

I didn't sleep after 12:30 am, because what if the alarm didn't wake me? Sigh.

And then I got up and got my ride into town and ran 13.1 miles in continuous light drizzle on a course that went over three bridges and two rivers and through countless neighborhoods, each with their own distinctive offerings: Polish pierogies, hand-made sausage, ZZ Top cover bands, gilded onion domes, bagpipers, high school cheerleaders waving pom-poms, 8th grader garage bands, and best of all, yet another high school friend, Kristen, squinting at the thousands of us streaming by, wondering if she'd be able to pick out the girl with a long brown ponytail, when about a third of a field of 18,000 runners had long brown ponytails.  YAYYYY!!!

By about mile eleven, I hurt more than I recall ever having hurt before at this point in a long run. But there's one thing I have built up over the course of training: grit. Not for a second did I consider quitting. One foot in front of the other, ho hum, that's my strategy. Ho de doh...hum dilly lah... wackadoo.... that's a song I invented. It doesn't have much of a tune, but it does help the time pass. (I'm hard core: I run alone, and I don't use an iPod.)

By the time I crossed the finish line, the race clock said something like 2 hours, 45 minutes. If you figure that I didn't actually cross the start line for at least ten or fifteen minutes, and if you additionally cheat (as I do) and don't count my one bathroom break, I finished in a little faster than 2:30. I can't rely on my magic Garmin to tell me my time, because I screwed up with it about six times in various ways.

How to screw up with your Garmin: A Brief List

1. Forget to start the actual workout routine, which is the whole point of using it: the workout routine will beep at me after eight minutes, wait a minute, and beep again. Lather rinse repeat as many times as it takes to cover the route. This ensures I take my walking breaks.

2. Because every other geek on the course is also using a Garmin, and they all make the same freaking beep, get confused, and start walking too soon because you overhear someone else's beeps.

3. Get distracted by the unbelievable VOLUME of some of the live music, and miss the "time to walk now" beep. Start walking when the "OK, start running again" beep sounds.

4. Get distracted by seeing your friend! Press the "stop" button so it won't count the time you spend giving her a hug. Realize, you were about to start a walking break anyway. Fail to re-start the clock, but walk with your friend anyway for about a minute. Sort of. Or something. Realize your intervals are now hopelessly confused. Keep running, effectively missing your subsequent walking break. Wonder why you're so friggin' tired.

5. Finally - and this might be my personal favorite - neglect to press the stop button when you cross the finish line.

I paid good money for that thing - it's a shame it's smarter than I am.

a 5K, two new flowers, and a spider

First up: the incredible athletic prowess around here. Yesterday, we ran in a 5K fundraiser benefitting the non-profit that Best Beloved is the executive director of  executively directs. (Apparently I’ll do anything to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.)

Third, baby. I came in third in my age group, tenth overall. Actually, I did the same thing two years ago, she said modestly. Well, I was third in my age group then, but 23rd overall – this year was much faster.
But that’s nothing. Guess who came in first in his age group? Sweetpea. He won a prize, and I made him give it to me. A sweet CamelBak hydration system water bottle. C’mon! It was hot pink! That’s clearly mine!

I’m just awful to him.

We had a good time at the race. It was a gorgeous day – just enough clouds to make it interesting, and the apple blossoms are just about to open.

A lot of people worked hard to put it together, and there was a great turnout. The T-shirts are cool, too. Lime green! Love it.  We had fun hanging out at our table o’ brochures. Well, I was naughty and played in the adjacent woods a lot.

There wasn’t a whole lot going on wildflower-wise, but there was this:

shagbark hickory!

On the forest floor, squat-all for flowers, except for what I’m currently thinking is Solomon’s Seal.

CHECK OUT THAT SPIDER! I didn’t see it until I got the shot up on the computer.

…and I learned that baby pinecones look like raspberries.

And now for today’s report. Strap in, it’s a long one.

A violet. There’s that bearded thing going on…

One of these red ferns I’ve been seeing around…

Canada mayflower. (Maianthemum canadense). A queen on her throne.

Bluets! (Houstonia caerulea). It was hard to get a shot that doesn’t include Maggie’s paw, stepping on them.

Foreground: the informant. Background: the lookout. I’m not just making this stuff up, am I?

Back to another batch of bluets. Doesn’t this look like it’s floating in space?

yeah, ditto.

Here’s a flower ID project. I use Newcomb’s Guide. (Got it cheap years ago in grad school; for some reason this edition costs – on Amazon – a ton. Maybe something better’s come along, but some folks are still hanging on to this one. Who knows.) There’s a simple methodology for looking at a flower to figure out what it is.
1. how many petals?

four.

.

how are the flowers arranged? on a single stalk, arranged in terminal cluster

what about the leaves? two of them – opposite one another – each of them subdivided into three leaflets, each of which is toothed.

we have white toothwort.
You may recall we’ve been waiting for beech buds to open. We’re using our patented time-lapse technique to show the process in slow motion. (Um, the technique is where you just look for a bunch of different buds, occasionally on different trees, at different stages in the process. I tell you, I am made of magic.)

The end sets of bud scales finally can’t hold it in any longer…

A pair of leaves make their escape.

The rest of the scales give up any hope of stopping the explosion.

ta-dah! whew.

Can it be? another flower ID project?

Wow. Um. Never seen that before, up close. Thank you, macro lens! Tiny, bell-shaped? Five petals, each a trippy snowflake.

arranged along a stalk…

two leaves, partway up, opposite, each toothy.

ladies and gentlemen, we have miterwort (Mitella dyphilla).

Another violet. This picture is upside-down, since I held the camera upside down to get it (we’re pretty low to the ground here). I love the blurriness of it. usually blurriness bugs me, but I think this one’s cool. I know it’s just blurry, but I like to think my camera’s capable of capturing auras. Wouldn’t that be something?

happy mother’s day!