I went for a three hour walk with a friend in some nearby woods that are famed for their wildflowers.
The stream in this bed was sometimes above ground, and sometimes below ground. A mystery for another day.
That green haze on the forest floor is a veritable carpet of flowers. Without further ado:
Dutchman’s breeches.
Squirrel corn.
In the above shot alone, there is dutchman’s breeches (lacy leaves at far left, and all over), squirrel corn (flowers at lower right), blue cohosh (tall stem on the left), trillium (self-evident, right?), wild ramp (fat narrow leaves), spring beauty (one eensy flower, right).
There was so much blue cohosh, I didn’t even bother to try to do it justice. The ones here were much further along than those at home, and I’ve found trying to capture cohosh is hard – the lightest, slightest breeze sets them to dancing.
But here’s a nice shot at a cool stage – the structure of the plant is opened up, but the leaves have yet to fully unfold.
The trillium were simply epic. A ton of them. And huge. Oh, and there’s trout lily in the background, and blue cohosh. Sick.
Gaaaaggghhhhh!
Jack-in-the-pulpit – these are the only ones we saw, perched on a rock ledge.
Weep-inducing Columbine.
Heart-stopping wild bleeding heart.
Crowfoot, a miniature early variety. As you can see, this is going to seed at a decent clip.
Trout lily up the wazoo. And a token spring beauty.
False ginseng.
Early saxifrage.
Miterwort.
Wild ginger’s freaky flower – I’ve always pegged this for a carnivore.
Red baneberry.
Multiple flavors of violet. You know you’re on system overload when you can’t even manage to take down enough detail to key out your violet species.
I was wearing chaco sandals, and after having done my 13 mile run yesterday, I’m not sure who got tired first: the soles of my feet, or my wonder-intake-capacity valve. I may need to eat an entire garlic pizza and soak up five episodes of “Eureka” just to recalibrate back to something approaching normal.
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.
This is not a blog about bugs.
But when they keep showing up, they keep showing up. From nose to wingtip, this guy was about 3/16” long. He’s sitting on some kind of wild grass (sedge? rush?)
This is what he was sitting on.
Yes indeedy, my next project is going to have be learning grasses and sedges.
I want this book, but I want it to manifest for free into my life. Anyone want to sponsor me and just send it to me?
I guess I have to live with Not Knowing.
And I may have to resort to naming these things myself in order to keep track of them. The one above is going to be Rose-Dusted Bottle Brush. OK, that was easy.
The wild roses are just starting to bloom, and they smell divine. Imagine how much better it will be when they all open up.
Despite recent developments in the bloom cycle, purple is not willing to cede the field to white and yellow just yet: the spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis) just started blooming.
According to a Japanese study cited on Wikipedia, “The cells of the stamen hairs of some Tradescantia are colored blue, but when exposed to sources of ionizing radiation such as gamma rays, the cells mutate and change color to pink; they are one of the few tissues known to serve as an effective bioassay for ambient radiation levels.”
Well, here’s hoping that doesn’t come in handy.
Remember how yesterday I couldn’t get a good shot of False Solomon Seal berries? Today went a little better.
False Solomon Seal berries. At this point, they are 1/16” in diameter. That’s it. Tiny.
I also ID’d this vine that is in perpetual warfare with the black raspberries:
It’s the one-seeded bur cucumber(Sicyos angulatus), of course. (I’ve been growing cucumbers all along? Wow. I had no idea.) Yes, it’s in the gourd family, but apparently the fruit isn’t really edible. But it does make fabulous squigglies with its vines.
Last, but not least, a quick visit to a tall buttercup
The edges are blurry, but the center holds. Take that, Yeats.
And this is what a buttercup gone to seed looks like. Very similar to the crowfoot of yesterday. In fact, eerily so, since they have nearly the same kind of leaf shape, too. Let’s review, shall we?
