wisdom as dispensed by the municipal mowing team

I was dismayed to see the town’s mowing crew vehicles out on our dirt road this morning. Devastation and chaos ensued.

This jack-in-the-pulpit wasn’t too pleased, either.

Fortunately, others survived. These continue to be GREEN.

...except this one, but this one looks like it’s still trying to GET green, rather than transitioning from green to red.
(As I type this, the mowers are just outside the house. I shudder to think of the fate of folks I was JUST photographing a few minutes ago. Hopefully the blades are set too high to wipe out the campion. Sob.)
It was stupendously hot, and I was moving quickly, because my goal was to get about a mile away to where some jewelweed is starting to bloom, without expiring on the way. I’ve seen gigantic jewelweed but only one flower, so I planned to investigate and see what I could learn.
I couldn’t resist the just-opening milkweed flowers, though:

*slurp*

This guy got crud all over his feet and spent some time clinging to the underside of a leaf, cleaning its back legs. But it kept a front leg hooked over the edge to hang on:

What the hell are those little paddles coming off the joints? That is crazy.
Celandine seed pods are ripening. Apparently they orange up as they ripen...

...because then they apparently just explode, leaving just the husks:

One still had seeds inside...

Looking up the road to the acres of jewelweed I planned to visit, I realized they were all gone:

Slashed down without so much as a by-your-leave. There goes that project.
On the unmowed side of the road, I saw a fair amount of jewelweed, but just a single flower, and a few seedpods.

Maybe they just...don’t...flower every year? Sigh. I’ll figure it out eventually.
When life’s mower comes along, change what side of the road you’re on. That’s my new motto. I found stuff I wasn’t expecting – such bonuses as red baneberry...

These seem to get red more the way apples do – green blushing into red. Still no clue how those jack-in-the-pulpit berries are going to get red. Perhaps by magic, overnight?
A few trillium, long gone to seed:

And all the celandine I showed you a minute ago.
By this point I was dripping sweat and ready to go home.

Almost home - I found another stash of these across the street from my neighbor’s mailbox, but I fear I will never be able to ID them, as the gnashing of mowers have probably just wiped it all out.

Farewell, sweetie. I saw you.

sunday ramblings

 

Fall’s definitely on its way. The milkweed pods are nowhere near opening up, but they are losing their green.

july 24

september 16

Bittersweet nightshade berries are so translucent, that you can make out the seeds inside them.

Jewelweed – aka “touch me not” – flower. Loving the texture.

 

cattails lose all dignity when they go to seed.

 

I was aiming for the flowers of the japanese knotweed, but found this wasp instead.

And now, for the jester’s hat of the campion’s seedhead:

there are goodies to behold inside.

it took me a few tries to focus on the mysteries within.

oooohhhh! another whole little world in there! I explored all this last september, too – you can see that here.

I should have taken basket weaving

Recent snail sightings – species unknown, but Oxyloma retusum seems like a possibility.
On goldenrod leaves:


In the husk of musk mallow seed cases:


On a stalk of curly dock:


On jewelweed leaves:


Speaking of musk mallow seed cases, aren’t they gorgeous?

time-lapse of campion, and exploding jewelweed

It’s time for one of my famed time-lapse sequences, this time of white campion (Lychnis alba).
Step 1: The Flower.
Hello, flower! And hello, little spider lurking in the middle there! (Hint: it’s green. You can see two legs.)

Step 2: Things fall off The petals fall off, leaving the stamens to wave around indolently. All the action is now happening in the bulging ovary.

Step 3: More things fall off
The stamens fall off, and the extraneous membrane (‘m sure there’s a botanically accurate name for it around here somewhere…) around the ovary begins to rot, dry up, and fall off as well.

Ooooh, check that out. Yet another example of the brilliance of that flower that mimics Playtex tampon applicators.

Step 4: POP!  Seeds! Seeds! Seeds!
Thus unencumbered, the tip of the pod bursts open along the star-pattern on its end:

Shall we take a look inside?

Look at those amazing little seeds! I suspect that texture functions like velcro, because that one on the end is stuck there. That pod is CHOCK FULL of those little seeds. I tried like hell to get a good, in-focus shot, without much luck. Here are some outtakes:

Speaking of POP, it is now time to reveal the joy that is jewelweed seeds, which explode when you touch them. Hence the other common name of “touch-me-not”. (Which is super-ironic, because apparently you can use jewelweed as a salve against poison ivy.)
The jewelweed around our house is like a pregnant woman four months along. You can tell she’s pregnant  - MAYBE - if you know her well, and know what you’re looking for. In other words, the flowers are fertilized, but progress is discreetly hidden deep within the flower.  Out in Whitingham, though – higher elevation, shorter growing season - the jewelweed is more like a six- to nine-month pregnant woman. I’m just gonna ride this analogy now that I’ve started it.
We’ll start with one that still has its petals on. Hm, I do believe this flower has been fertilized!

See how there’s some some green something-something happening behind the frilly bits?
Cut to the rest of the last trimester (I warned you, I was going to ride this analogy for all it was worth…) At some point, all the orange petal material falls away – I have yet to see that in part-way mode; I’ve only seen All On, versus All Fallen Off.
And here we go with the big bellied girls. Once the petals are dispensed with, additional seed development seems to occur, because I’ve seen these seed pods at varying levels of Fatness. (To be truly thorough, I’d follow a few specimens over a few days, but I had one day with these particular babies – I’ll have to keep an eye out on the ones closer to home.)

Some are skinny…	…and some are fat.

I tried and failed to film what happens when you touch a fat jewelweed pod. I can show you the results, though:

Sproing-oing-oing-oing-oing!
The seeds fly out, and the skin holding them in – the pod, I guess – is all post-explosion curly.

Fannnn-tastic.

orange things

Today: gray, rain, gray, rain, gray. Rain. We’ll be fine in our neck of the woods, but I worry about all the communities already devastated by That Bitch Irene. Our preparations consist of putting trash barrels out under the one spot where 1/4 of all our roof runoff goes.

There is nothing like a rainy day to induce one to prowl in the basement looking for stuff to donate to either Goodwill, or the local church’s white elephant sale. Yes, it was a virtuous day. Very virtuous. I promised photos, and photos you shall have.

How do you like the shape of the baby seed stuff? Fascinating, huh?
On chunk of log near the woodpile, we have more of that orange stuff. My guru friend Arianna thinks it might be witch’s butter. That would be a type of fungus, folks.

Last but not least: one more orange thing.

Deee-licious!

when left to their own devices, lawn weeds will overthrow the world

All summer long, I’ve been idly observing a random lawn weed here at home, but I haven’t had any luck in keying it out. It’s a short guy with a raceme of teensy pink buds. As near as I could tell, those suckers were never going to open, I was never going to get a petal count, and its identity would remain a mystery.
Well, today, for the first time, I went for a run in the woods near where I work, and on the way back, I swung by for a closer look at the mess of stuff growing along a stream that runs through the industrial campus. (Yep, here in Vermont, we have woods and trails and streams in our industrial parks. Why would you want to live anywhere else?)
When I took a closer look at this stuff – a thicket of three and a half foot tall things…

…I about jumped out of my skin.

It’s my random lawn weed! In fact, it appears to be two versions of it: the darker pink kind with the reddish stem (drooping down, above), and the pale pink kind with somewhat larger flower buds.
So I ran inside to get my camera, and my coworkers thought, judging from the way I was bouncing up and down, that I’d experienced something really exciting, like maybe running into a bear or something. I said, “I DID! I FOUND OUT WHAT THIS LITTLE LAWN WEED IS WHEN YOU LET IT GROW!” …and they all moved away from me on the bench there...They don’t know about my little nature girl gig, see.

Some of those teensy flowers were open and tonight, with the help of my trusty Newcomb’s, I finally nailed this down as a knotweed, in the buckwheat family. Gotcha!
I also got one of my best pregnant jewelweed shots yet:

(If you’re new here, you might have missed my various odes to jewelweed. All the jewelweed you can handle, right here, or here, or even here. Go on, check it out, we’ll still be here when you get back.)
Finally, we have some exploded thistle.

Mmmmmm.