orange velvety goodness, miterwort seeds, and stealth hostas

New today: the first of the day lilies next to the house.

Oh my heavens. I think I need to cool off.
OK, I lied, that wasn’t a crocus the other day. It was – I believe – a stealth hosta (Hosta sneakiensis). Let’s compare and contrast, shall we?

CROCUS - rounded petals - curvy fluted stamens - no leaves to speak of	STEALTH HOSTA
	- pointy petals - straight anthers (flat yellow things on top of the stamens) - this flower is nestled in a rosette of basal leaves.

The crocus picture is from months ago. The stealth hosta is from three days ago.

Today, our little mystery friend is already shriveled up. And here we enter the land of WTF?!? which enabled me to ID this as a hosta, because…


…it has a companion stalk that I swear is the same plant (I rustled around in there to check) – with a whole set of buds about to open up. You can just make out the shriveled petals with the dangly stamens, nestled in the bed of leaves, in the background, to the right of the unopened buds. You can also see that this plant has had a run-in with the lawnmower in the past, as some of its leaves have been chopped off. I used my logic tools and powers of deduction, and concluded: It’s a stealth hosta, intent on taking over a nice patch of hosta-free lawn. See, not far away, the no-doubt-about-it hostas are flowering.

…and they’ve been known to send little volunteers off into the lawn, which first appear as solitary leaves. Our crocus wannabe flower is probably a hosta volunteer that’s two steps ahead of those solitary leaves. Although the stamens don’t look right (compared to The Google), hosta flowers are six pointy-petaled bells, not unlike our mystery…Hm…I’ll have to wait til all the various flowers – both of the mystery stalk, and the regular hosta, are open, and then compare.
You’ll wait with bated breath, right? I knew you would.
In other news, not all cinquefoil leaves look like well, what I already said they look like.

Here’s another kind, whiling away a summer’s day out by the pole barn. This is rough cinquefoil (Potentilla norvegica). There comes a time when you heave a great sigh and say “lo and behold, could it be? Another five-petaled yellow flower?”
Sometimes I get lucky, and I find a four-petaled yellow flower instead. O Happy Day! To wit: yesterday I claimed I saw some sundrops but I wasn’t sure – today I checked it out some more and instead have concluded it was really evening primrose. They show up on the same page in the flower guide, so it shouldn’t be offended by my mistake.

This is a plant that at eye-height, isn’t done growing up.

The flowers are modest by day, and open up at twilight. I’d go out and prove it to you, but a) it’s raining and b) I’m lazy. Actually, I had an amusing moment today. Check out a picture of one of these specimens, that I took yesterday:

Yeah it’s overexposed and blurry, but it was intended to help me key it out. This plant appears less than a foot tall, right? That’s what I  thought. Guess again.

Here we are today....

It’s easily three or three and a half feet long. It’s just fallen over, but the tip where the flowers are (over on the left) has gamely righted itself. Yes, Your Observant Amateur Naturalist failed to notice this yesterday. DUH.
To assuage my guilt pangs, Mother Nature threw a different four-petaled yellow flower at me today:

Common St. Johnswort. Boatloads of stamens, and little dots at the edges of the petals.
Moving on.

The tall anemone, aka thimbleweed, flowers have abandoned all pretense of having had petals, and now they just look like buzz-cut pineapples on sticks.

Remember agrimony? Brand new to me as of the other day? Check out its seeds.

These might be the things Charlie comes in to the house coated in. I’m not sure.
But speaking of seeds. BOY DO I HAVE A COOL THING TO SHOW YOU. We need to go back in the time travel machine to the beginning of May. Remember miterwort?

One of the earliest spring flowers around here.	It has these incredibly tiny, snowflake-shaped flowers.

Well, I decided to visit the woodland mystery today, and whaddaya know, miterwort is still going strong, and is ready with its seeds.
Are you not in love? I am.
Speaking of love…

Here we have a bumblebee locked in a passionate embrace with a purple-flowered raspberry flower. For which I am grateful, as the result…

… is pretty tasty.
And last, but not least, I missed the flowering of this, but I’m pretty sure this is fairy bells (Disporum laguninosum)

Sweet, eh? Should generate a red berry. Stay tuned.

I blame the waiter.

Yesterday afternoon I was in serious need of grounding. I snarfed up over 200 photos in a delirious binge of flower-appreciation in which I ranged a full half-mile farther than I normally go, but had no time to post about it. Why? Because it was our fifth wedding anniversary, hooray!
This called for going out. The original plan was to just go out to dinner together, but as it turns out, Our Whole Crowd was feeling festive, and we wound up meeting for drinks first and then all going to dinner together. We took up the biggest table available in our favorite place and wound up making so much noise that the waiter came over and asked us to simmer down. Apparently they don’t like it when you stand up at the table, hold hands, and sing Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”. The other patrons liked it – they joined in. Good thing for the waiter that the gratuity was included in the check, that’s all I have to say.
I know you’ve been eagerly awaiting more flower pictures, am I right? Here goes:

Some anemones have their act together.

Some don’t.
After a whole lot of this…

…it looks like we’re finally getting another wave of spiderwort.

The wild raspberries – well, technically, the “purple-flowering” raspberries – are finally looking presentable as fruit. Actually, we’ve had some along the shared drive for several days now, and I’m happy to report, they’re quite edible.

These are along our own individual driveway. Their history up til now was chronicled here.
The innards of Indian hemp are coming along. These flowers are tiny – maybe a 1/4” across, tops.

This is a plant that when it was in wee-little-shoot stage, looked JUST like milkweed shoots to my untutored eye. They’re both tall – four feet or so – and both have opposite leaves. You can break a stem and see if the juice is milky (in which case – I’ll give you one guess as to what that one is…), but I’m rather polite to my neighbors – I don’t like to fold, spindle, or mutilate them if I can help it. Eventually I was able to sort it out.

Indian hemp. Flowers much sooner; dark green leaves with very light veins; leaves are <=2” wide. Also, tends to have big branches of equal size to the main one, and thus more than one bunch of flowers per plant.	Milkweed. leaves are lighter, veins are pinker; leaves are also wider. Just one big shoot, no branching, thus, just the one bunch of flowers. There are boatloads of milkweed species and I don’t know anything more than what I’ve got growing right here. (That was a disclaimer. Could you tell?)

Plus there’s the dogbane, which is just like the Indian hemp only blah blah blah, I’ll tell you more about that some other day.
Now here’s something interesting. The oxeye daisies are bulging up. To wit:
Before:

After:

POOF!
I found several new-to-me species yesterday. Ladies and gents, welcome to agrimony. I don’t have a good feeling about agrimony. Maybe because the word is so similar to acrimony.

Here’s the big picture view. A stalk with little yellow flowers and pinnately compound leaves, with lots of little extra leaflets thrown in for good measure.

Here’s where I geek out and say that this reminds me of the Mandelbrot set.

And here are agrimony’s flowers. I’m not 100% sure which species of agrimony this is, but let’s go with Plain Old Agrimony for now: Agrimonia gryposepala.
The bittersweet nightshade – still a top vote-getter for coolest flower around here – is starting to go to seed. What flowers remain are looking tired…

…and some are closing up shop.

In some cases, we have lovely pearly green berries

…which will eventually go red.
One of the grasses I’ve been watching has also been…flowering? is it all done already? Time for compare and contrast.

June 28	July 8

Other grasses are going golden as well. This gives a whole new feeling to the enterprise – like summer, deep summer, is right around the corner.

We have some purple loosestrife here and there in the neighborhood, which isn’t particularly good news. (It’s an invasive.)

Another new species: wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa)


Warning: do not touch. Well, OK, touch it, but don’t disturb it and get any juices on you from broken stems. It’s poisonous – UV radiation will cause a phytochemical burn. I’ve never actually suffered this, mind you, but I’ve heard about it.
And another new one – I’m telling you, banner day yesterday.

Tall bellflower (Campanula americana)
And another, another new one:

butter-and-eggs (Linaria vulgaris). Prize for most awesome name. Is there a bacon-and-egg flower?
Apropos of poisonous things by which I mean, the wild parsnip, as bacon and eggs are NOT poisonous in my book, I’ve noticed that the roadsides this year are positively swimming in poison ivy.

What the hell? That’s no fair. I blame the waiter.