the beauty of decay

 

See if you can guess what these are.

They are wilting hosta leaves.

Aster-like flower, I believe.

Leather? or leaf?

 

J is for Jennifer. (Hi, Jen!)

[Newsflash – I forgot to include my favorite picture from the day!!]

 

Ahhh, much better.

milkweed pods, strange black-eyed susans, spider eyes…

My dearest readers, have I really neglected you since Thursday? ‘Tis true. Where are my manners? What have I been doing? Ummmmmm….I’ve been enjoying life! I seem to be doing OK with the plantar fasciitis so far, via a ton of stretching/strengthening exercises and a teensy six mile run yesterday. And I’ve added to the blueberry stash: we’re up to 30 pounds of blueberries in the freezer. That was my original goal, but now I think we might…just…need…more.
Onwards to the flower report. The milkweed pods are growing by leaps and bounds.

Let’s review: just three days ago, this pod was the same size as my nail.
That one milkweed on our neighbor’s property is also taking off, pod-wise.

I was asked by a fellow blogger who does amazing macro shots of wildflowers whether I knew if that crazy tubular-petaled black-eyed susan is a cultivar, or a different species altogether. I have no idea, but here’s some more data to feed into the hopper:
Crazy tubular – this is over at my dad’s house:

Let’s compare this to a lone hybrid mutant out in back of the pole barn

Some of its petals are that tubular, and some are regular.
Another thing I’ve been noticing about black-eyed susans: they are commonly hosts to tiny white spiders, perhaps more than one kind. Some seem to have markings, while others are straight-up white:

Others seem yellow, or maybe it’s just because this one is lurking at the base of the yellow petals:

Yellow or white, check out her fierce little eyes!
Nothing says “back off!” quite like a thistle:



Goldenrod: distilled sunshine.

Congress of aliens? Or merely Queen Anne’s Lace?

Incipient Deliciousness: the first of the purple-flowering raspberries has ripened.

While others are still doing the “fertilize me, fertilize me!” dance.
An unexpected invasion of hostas on the hillside bordering the driveway. I guess they’re not content being confined right up next to the front of the house.

Somebody’s been eating the ripe berries of the wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis, and previously erroneously identified as ginseng or as red baneberry.)



Speaking of blue berries, the blue cohosh leaves are beginning to fade, but the berries…

…are not yet blue.
Some lovely peach lilies along the side of the driveway are taking over from the long-gone siberian irises and spiderwort:

heat exhaustion…hypothermia…pick one.

Is it possible to experience heat exhaustion and hypothermia inside the same 48 hour period? Probably. This is something I contemplated late this morning as I huddled, shivering, in the basement’s tunnel entrance to my dad’s house, contemplating the light rain that was falling, and the pressing need to get the lawn mowed. Just yesterday morning, I somehow powered through a 13.5 mile run in 80+ degree humidity. My running guru, Jeff Galloway, advises that in 80+ temperatures, you can expect your per-mile pace to drop by two minutes. Mine sure did! In fact, yesterday’s run was intended to be 17 miles, which is part of my whole campaign to knock ten or fifteen minutes off my half-marathon time.
I’ve given up on that goal – at least for this particular event. The first several weeks of the training program, which involved complicated speed drills on alternate long-run weekends, went fabulously. I had no trouble keeping the target pace of 9:20. And then summer hit. Lordy. Plus, as I’ve already whined several times to my loved ones, this particular race starts at 9:00 am. Utter foolishness! By 9:00, we could easily already be over 80 degrees. By 9:00, we should be standing around feeling smug, eating bagels. Grumble grumble grumble! 
But you know what? I have zero regrets. This training has been terrific. I love training for half marathons! The nuisance of having told the world I’m signed up for an event has a bracing effect on my resolve on those mornings when I tempt myself to put off a long run. And knowing that however slow I may be, I can run 13+ miles, makes up for some of the minor indignities of being 43.
So the rain cleared up, and we got busy with the lawn. As usual, Kevin played on the tractor mower, and I hauled the push mower around. Want to see my blisters? You can admire my wedding ring while you’re at it.

At one point, I’d mowed everything that made sense for me to do with the push mower. Out came the camera! First up:
Our Friend, The Inch Worm. I discovered Inch Worm on my leg, which he’d gotten onto from a nearby grass stem. After a moment of flailing panic – even Nature Girl has instincts that dictate the inadvisability of personal contact with anything the least bit Buggy or Wormy – I remembered I’d brought the camera with me. I couldn’t get good shots until I encouraged him to come onto my finger.

I could feel his little feet as pin pricks. I coaxed him off when I noticed he was looking like he wanted to have a sample taste of me. Sorry, dude.


This oxeye daisy has dropped all of its petals.


The tiny white flowers might be wild madder. To be honest, I didn’t look closely enough. The green thing just white of center is a buttercup flower having gone completely to seed.


Timothy grass in full, epic flowering! What a mess! Yippee!


Cow vetch. This is a vine. Let’s look at its sneaky little tendrils.

I see stuff like this, and I have to laugh at the hubris of thinking we humans are the only clever ones.


Jewel weed! Jewel weed! Jewel weed! Let’s get the head-on view:


With respect to stamens/anthers (male parts) and pistils/stigma (female) parts, I’m not familiar enough with these to know why these two specimens are different – what’s what, what the process looks like, is one of these already fertilized, etc.. We have some somewhere around own house – I’ll have to study up.

Here’s a hosta flower…I must say, these are structured very similarly to day lilies…

Here’s a bee in transit from one hosta flower to another. This is called, “hold the camera upside down and hope you get a reasonable shot.”
And now for the day’s jaw droppers…black-eyed susans, either weirdo mutants, or this is what their petals look like when they’re brand-new.



It’s this shot in particular that makes me think that these petals are as the Universe intended – tubular. Too bad I won’t see this particular flower for another week or so!



And now for a different, slightly younger/less opened-up example:


Or how about this next one? “Noooo…that can’t be the alarm clock…I don’t want to get up yet…”


Today’s mystery flower – I can’t find it in Newcomb’s, or online – I suspect it’s some kind of mallow, but don’t quote me.


Yep, little larva flower bits. Fascinating…

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.