june is busting out all over and bonus dragonfly

Let’s start with Pieris bush – the one whose flowers looked like spider-filled barnacles. The berries are just popping.

A few days ago - May 28.

Today

Similar story for the Solomon’s Seal.

And now, for the Siberian Irises:

Black raspberry canes, the bane of my existence, are flowering. Which means that as usual, I’ll forgive vast swathes of them, since I do tend to forage in the yard at the end of summer…

“pick me! pick me!” (dogwood.)

And this is why I can’t find any of the trillium to show you how their seeds are shaping up. It’s just a jungle out there. Front and center: blue cohosh.

In the meantime, over by the gardenshed, the rhododendron is exploding.

As well as a third azalea, to go with the red and the coral azalea.

This modest-looking dragonfly was hanging out on our front steps. Based on bugguide.net, I’m going with Chalk-fronted Corporal - Ladona julia

happy memorial day weekend!

How are you celebrating it? We’re going with our usual strategy of embracing the beauty of the every day around here. Our next two weekends are going to be jam-packed, so we’re laying as low as we can today. Today started as our Saturdays generally do: “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” on NPR, pancakes, and bacon. This week, Local Hero Tom Bodett (he lives not far from here) won the contest. Hometown proud, that’s us.
Kevin’s been busy the last couple of days setting up garden beds. This year, we’ll have three 4’x12’ beds. He’s in charge, given that I don’t garden. (I know: you’d think I would, being all nature girly Princess Groundy Pants, but I’m not there yet.) I believe the plan is, watermelon, cantaloupe, white onions, bell peppers, and green beans. Plus – still in the realm of imagination, as I have not lifted a finger to make this happen – cherry tomatoes. (Those will be on the deck in containers.)

Voilà!

In today’s flower report, the wild strawberries are going to seed, bit by bit. If you stare at the center of the one on the right and squint, you can see little green bits that look like they’ll be the surface of a strawberry. Don’t strawberries have lots of little seeds like, on their surfaces? Yeah, that sounds right. So will the berry grow outward and end up encompassing each of these little stamens? The more I look at the world, the more I realize I don’t know nuthin’.

before…	and after

 

Iris flowers are getting bolder. Go, go, go!

Most of the big ferns are just about completely opened up – they’re as tall as my ribcage. Sometimes the tips of the ferns get tangled up in one another and it takes them a while to sort it out.

Round-leaved dogwood (Cornus rugosa) suddenly appeared out of nowhere, complete with ants and other buggies crawling all over the flowers. This is a shrub; I’m not sure how big it can get.

Apparently I don’t get tired taking pictures of bluets. They have a magical floaty look to them that I can’t resist…

The honeysuckle opened up today! Yee haw!

In the mystery woodland today, as I was being eaten alive by mosquitos, I saw a couple of starflower plants that had actually produced flowers. I’d seen a lot of these over the course of the spring, but no flowers until today. These guys were HUGE – easily twice the size of any of the plants I’d seen all along.

They’re dusty with someone else’s pollen.

I love how the flowers themselves look just like the plant. The flower stalk is the most delicate thing you’ve ever seen.

Not all the flowers around here are white…the second azalea out back has popped open in the last two days.

The first azalea’s still kicking butt, too.

Plus, nestled under the azalea, we have what I think are your basic chives…

Hi sweetie!

we have a wood turtle! we have a wood turtle!

Today was mostly about “ooops”. As in

• “Oops, I spent so long wandering around with the camera this morning that I’m 45 minutes later than I intended to be getting over to the hospital to do Reiki”. “
• “Oops, my phone battery is dead.”
• “Oops, I left my lights on and my car battery’s dead.”
• “Oops, I missed my dentist appointment because my car battery died.”
• “Ooops, I’m four days late putting Toxic Death Gel on the cat and as a result, I have a tick. On my back. Where I can’t reach it.”

On many a day, all this would have freaked me out, but all I can think is, “WE HAVE A WOOD TURTLE! WE HAVE A WOOD TURTLE!” and all is well in my world! All batteries have since been recharged, my own included. The tick’s been removed and flushed to its greater reward.
To rewind, this is how my day started:
The very first thing I did this morning, before even making coffee, was, I went outside to see if the turtle was still there. It wasn’t. Rats. As I turned around to head back inside, I froze in surprise as I saw it was ten feet away from me, staring at the garage door. I tiptoed inside and grabbed the camera…and the compost bucket, which was full.

I headed back out. I apologized to the turtle, dumped the compost, and invited him (her?) to check it out.


I think I’m in love.
Turtle headed toward the compost, but changed his (her?) mind, and then over the the course of a half hour or so, wandered toward the pole barn and up into the woods.

The journey begins.
Since I was already outside with the camera, I went a-visitin’…

Bluets are still going strong, mostly because I spared them the wrath of the lawnmower the other day.

Lily-of-the-valley.

A hosta has taken over a spot formerly inhabited by spring beauties and trillium, at the base of the yellow birch tree.

Foamflower, aka false miterwort, is still going strong.

So’s the actual miterwort. I love how each flower is connected by spiderwebs.

The azalea over by the garden shed is the current noisy thing in the yard.
Speaking of noisy, since the Handel concert last Sunday was a smash success, standing ovation, etc. woo hoo! – we’ve now got five, count ‘em five, rehearsals to figure out the chorale in Movement 4 of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. For some idiotic reason I’ll be singing the soprano part. The one that has a whoooooole lot of over-the-staff singing. Super, super high. A whole page of high “A”, as a f’rinstance.
I can easily nail a high A in the shower, in the car, while minding my own business. But put a score in front of me? And the words in German? I won’t be able to hit anything above a D (a D, for cryin’ out loud!) until I’m pretty comfortable with the music. I’m like a fair-weather soprano, I guess. But the choir director is overloaded with altos on this one, and wants me to stay with the sopranos on this one. Gulp.

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)…