little miss cranky

What a gorgeous weekend we just had here in beautiful southern Vermont, and gosh golly ma’am, what a CRAPPY MOOD I’VE BEEN IN. I’m having trouble adjusting to the season changing. I’m already half in February in my mind, when there is nothing and I mean nothing, blooming, and it’s so cold I can’t dawdle outside the way I like to and even if I could, the camera doesn’t work well in the cold either. And I haven’t run even so much as five miles at a pop in weeks, and I miss my endorphins and I’m MEAN.
Mind you, it’s not even the fall equinox yet, but I didn’t let that get in the way of my perfectly miserable mood.
Instead, I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. That’s right, I left the house, while in a foul mood. I hung out with our mutual friend, and the two of us groused about how crabby we were, and then I bonded with my hostess friend for a bit, and she confessed she was grumpy too – something about All These People Coming Over. So that lifted my mood considerably, I had a fine old time, and watched these other people I didn’t know fire potatoes off into the woods with a potato rocket. It’s some PVC pipe and it involves lighting hairspray on fire. Brilliant.
I burned off some of the bad ass attitude with housework, and with a (for me) furiously fast 4.5 miler today. And yesterday I worked out on the treadmill AND went for an aggressively paced 4 mile walk. Plus, I forced myself outside as well, to prove to myself that things are still growing.To wit:

wild rose hips. See that spooge? Remember it from here? It’s all the dried up stamens and stuff. Nice!


thank god for hawkweed.


yellow foxtail. Try and eat my seeds and I’ll STAB YOU.


aster flowers having a perm.


cattails are starting to lose their minds.


morning glory starting to pack it in for the day.


“stick out your tongue”, aka butter-and-egg.


riots of queen anne’s lace, above and below.



more yellow foxtail, above and below.

onwards and upwards.

new things happen all the time

I found something I’ve never seen before – which feels like a treat at this point in the year, as I ready myself for fall and the inevitable fading away of All Lovely Newness. I’m always happy to be proved wrong, as I was in spectacular fashion:

Waaaahhh!! How cool is this? It’s groundnut, also called wild bean (Apios americana). Its flowers have a “distinctive, sweetish odor” – amen to that. It’s a vine – here it is ambitiously scaling a tree:

It’s irregular flower day around here. I found a new stash of butter-and-egg (Linaria vulgaris) flowers:

How does this thing even get pollinated? The darker yellow part looks like it’s obstructing access to the nether regions of the flower. Hm.  Somehow fertilization must happen, because here we see what I’m assuming are the stigma, after all the petal-like parts have given way.
 
In other exciting news, I found what I thought at first was an adult ladybug about to emerge from the pupa. Imagine my surprise when it started walking around and flew away!

It turns out that this is a tortoise beetle. That name makes sense, given that it looks like it has an extra shell over its shell. God, being the beetle fiend that s/he is, made a bunch of these: there are 114 species of these in North America and Canada alone, according to bugguide.net. I was happy to make the acquaintance of just one of them, since this morning, I didn’t even know these existed. I’ll bet you didn’t, either, right?
I had some fun observing a musk mallow (Malva moschata). First, on one of the leaves, we have this awesome pair of whatevers (snails?) (but they have pointy shells. Do they still count as snails if their shells aren’t the classic snail shape?)

They were perched over the volcanic abyss of the the nearest flower blossom:


Peering into the depths of said volcano…

oooohhhh…
Meanwhile, the sepals that enclose the flower buds stick around after the petals fall off, and then start to fall apart, thusly:

Presumably there’s a seed or two enclosed in that basket-like structure.
They’re still blooming, though:

Oh! there’s another new species! I actually saw it the other day, but didn’t post about it because all the yellow flowers were clamoring to be featured, and this flower is white.

This is virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana). I love how you can see, in the bud just opening up in the lower right of the photo, all those stamens raring to go.
And, another new species showed up in my awareness today. I believe it’s a gentian, but I’ll have to wait til the flowers open to confirm:

That looks promising, doesn’t it?

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.