the big picture and the small picture

I had a marathon conversation with my best friend today – I call her my wife, which gets confusing, since this blog is named “musings from dave” and there’s no Dave in sight and I’m a girl married to a guy named Kevin. (New here? Here’s who Dave is.) ANYHOW. Long conversation. With the camera in hand. This is what happened while we were having ourselves a good soul spring cleaning.

“I’m in jail!”

Oh, no I’m not.

(Actually, this is part of what we were talking about. How to get the screen out of the way. The human dilemma: we get to choose our own perceptions, which means, rats, we’re responsible for ourselves. You know, you can be the bug, you can be the windshield, something like that.)

Let’s be naughty and go out on the roof.

You get a lovely view from the point of no return. Or so Terry Pratchett says.

Ho hum. Back to ground level we go…

For the record: On May 7, 2010, the last of the magnolia blossoms was about to drop. This year, they’re just starting to open, still, after a couple of days hanging out like this:

I guess they’re savoring the sun. I should start a betting pool on when we get x (say, 50?) percent of them wide open. Any takers?

The aliens lilac flowers are coming along nicely. They appreciate the sun – it was rainy for two days before today.

OK, we’re entering the Woodland Mystery now.

‘Tis guarded by the venerable yellow birch, here seen with some of its retinue of admirers. Seriously, there’s a whole pile of wildflowers at the base of this tree, most of which appear on this blog somewhere or other.

The butternut (white walnut, Juglans cinerea) that skulks at the side of that birch. Is it just me, or do you see the main leaf in the middle having a conversation with the leaf on the right? “Well, I never!” Oh wow – see how much this has opened up just since yesterday?

Also in the retinue a the base of the yellow birch: I used to think this was a sessile-leaf bellwort before it it big enough for me to see the wee little buds forming in the axils with the leaves. Whoops! This makes it look like Solomon Seal (actual, not false), but it’s so tiny… (maybe three inches tall.) I guess a big plant has to start off tiny at some point, right? I guess I’m having a learning experience here.

Into the leaf litter and sea of vinca we go. I tried HARD to get a shot of a spent birch catkin that shows that the little bits are arranged in a spiral down the length of the catkin, but I just couldn’t capture it. So you’ll just have to believe me. It’s something I didn’t notice until I started playing with one that had fallen. It makes sense from a design point of view – it’s like a tightly coiled spring, a way to get a lot of materiel organized for rapid deployment.

Pretty sure this is starflower, so…where’s the flower? (There “should” be a stalk coming out of the center where the leaves meet…) (Maybe they’re like Canada mayflower and take two years to come to full throttle?)

Pachysandra, making inroads from its headquarters at the base of the magnolia, into the vinca-dominated woodland mystery. I almost didn’t take this picture, but I’m glad I did, because you can see the bases of the flower bits swelling up, compared to when I first saw them.

A shy vinca.

Charlie comes along for the ride. That bright green to the far right is the pachysandra’s base of operations.

In the meantime, on the west side of the house, the snail ferns plot their next move. Another spiral. Nature’s awfully sneaky.

We have a sea of vinca over there, as well. Hooray!

This is how a beech responds when you cut it down. A hell of stump sprouts. This will take several years of disciplined cutting back to starve out, I think. I know that sounds mean! But this tree was too close to the addition’s footprint – its branches would have overhung the roof. So down it came.

Oh hey, that’s where I stopped. Hope you’re having a lovely day, wherever you are!

you have eight minutes. go.

Pizza’s in the oven. I have eight minutes to goof off in the yard. Let’s see what I can cook up other than whole wheat crust pizza with homemade pesto, an extra fistful of chopped garlic, broccoli, and hot cherry peppers. Oh, and pepperoni and garlic for Sweetpea.

Lilac flowers, otherwise known as the space aliens in their spaceship pod, continue to ripen.

Good news! We have violets in the lawn. A crappy lawn is so much more interesting than one with actual grass.

Let’s get all porno and zoom in on the naughty bits. And yes, I’ve just guaranteed myself more hits on this blog by using the “p” word there. I’m such a whore. Whoa, more blog hits. I think this is a win for all of us today!

Everybody always looks at the daffodils. Few stop to wonder what they’re looking at themselves.

The reclaimed mystery woodland. That’s the GINORMOUS stump of a black cherry tree. I’m not talking the pretty-blossoms-delicate-little-ornamental kind of cherry. I’m talking a freakin’ CHERRY tree, the kind you try to turn into your kitchen cabinets if you have money to burn. No idea when it was taken down – before our watch.

squashed by the rain.

Who keeps EATING these poor things? (Trillium erectum)

I wish that I could tell you that I deliberately created these two differently-focused shots, but really, it was the camera having its own fun. This is that azalea-type shrub. 

Wild ginger (Asarum canadense) flower – the one I think looks carnivorous. Are those squiggly things in there worms? Probably not, huh.

I still have no clue what this is. It is one of many kinds of flowers growing at the base of a huge yellow birch on the edge of the lawn. The flowers have yet to open up.

Here’s where I go all magical and announce that I’ve found the discarded bridal veil of a faery princess.

White walnut, aka butternut (Juglans cinerea) aka monkey-face (see the little monkey-face in the leaf scar?) – anyhoo, it’s just starting to leaf out. This young tree is right in the shadow of the yellow birch and I probably “should” kill it off as part of my Mystery Woodland Maintenance Program, but I don’t have the heart to.

In other news, I heard the thrush (I forget if it’s a hermit, or a wood, thrush – I certainly have never seen it, so that’s not helpful) in the woods for the first time today. A song to bring a smile!

lawn ornaments, monkey faces, and drunk bees

As if yesterday’s fabulous developments weren’t enough, last night was the first time we heard the spring peepers out on the pond. I can think of few sounds more thrilling to the soul than their song: they mean that without a doubt, spring is here. I may work on getting my own personal audio, rather than subject you to (gasp!) other people’s.
Today’s developments! Outtanowhere, we have some additional lawn ornaments. No, no pink flamingos, no crystal balls, no garden gnomes: we have beautiful flowers, randomly arranged at the edges of the lawn, thanks be to previous owners who apparently “garden”, this mysterious activity I’ve heard of:

These seem close to being a kind of blue-eyed grass, but for a variety of reasons I won’t bore you with unless you want to get all geeky with me offline, they don’t exactly fit the bill. The flowers are pretty big, for one thing – over an inch wide.

…unlike this kind, barely a half-inch wide.

Plus, we have a so-far lone miniature hyacinth


The daylilies continue to unfold.


You said something about monkey faces?

To plagiarize my own blog, this is Juglans cinerea – butternut, aka white walnut. Look at the leaf scar – the little monkey face. The dots and the smiley face are the cross section of veins that went into the stem of a leaf that has since fallen away. I’d last seen this out on the main road (or, what passes for a main road around here) but THIS guy is in our OWN SIDE YARD, just a few feet away from the mongo yellow birch that I love to stare at from the comfy chair upstairs. OH HAPPY DAY!

This is the mystery plant from yesterday – more of the flowers have opened up. I no longer believe it’s Empetrum atropurpureum, because the pictures I’ve found of that species online look way too….heathy. The leaves look kind of stubbier and sturdier than the delicate leaves of what’s growing here. So I am sans clue, alas.
As for the flowers, this will be WAY too much info for some of y’all, but I’m thinking, “playtex plastic tampon applicator” here.

You know I’m right.

OKAY, we just lost any boys who might have been reading this. Let’s keep the ball rolling by looking at the boy parts of the gray birch, as of today – if you’re new here, puh-leeze, go look at yesterday’s post – I’ve been keeping an eye on this.:

 

The catkins are really starting to open up, yeah? It’s only now that I realize my camera settings were dialed way down today so that I could send the concrete guy pictures of the newly-restained concrete floor without overloading his email with ginormous files. Mea culpa. (That’s another post.)
OK, I’ll leave you with one last story:

Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!

(They are actually two different flowers, and two different Um Bees I Guess.)