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.

cat/kin

We all ripen and develop at our own pace.

Some of us are rarin’ to go.

While others are biding their time. Lilac (Syringa vulgaris), same plant, just a branch or two apart.

Have I mentioned that these mystery flowers (first shown here,  here, and here) are barely a quarter inch long?

Miniature daffodils are making their move. Any day now.

The maybe-it’s-blue-eyed grass flowers are popping up in more places. Would you have guessed these little buggers were so satiny up close and personal? Oh, the blessings of macro zoom.

On the gray birch front, here’s where we are: Some catkins are opening up and looking like this one – the guts are a yellowy green:

I believe the one above is the same kind (male, gray birch --- as opposed to female, gray birch) as the ones shown below, that have been open a little longer:

The gray birch buds, on the other hand, are really sporting their new headresses. Still not clear what is happening here – I’m still going with Incipient Leaves:

Some crocuses/croci, are about done:

Not this one, though:

The miniature hyacinth has a baby sibling coming up:

And today’s new arrival?

Spring beauty – Claytonia virginica

I got help from Charlie (Felinicus beastum)

stick out your tongue and say “aaahhhh”…

The lilac buds are sticking out their tongues a little more.

It was a little drizzly today. The crocuses were having none of it.

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.)