in honor of eleven

Behold the Mighty Lumix, and its zoom lens. This eastern tiger swallowtail is at least 10 feet away from me. 

Incidentally, I never did find the monarch caterpillar again, after I first spotted it on July 2nd. By now it's probably several sizes bigger. 

Mullein. 

Out on the road, musk mallow. 

Does this remind you of anything?

Maybe gray birch's fuchsia party hats? 

Random shrubbery. No clue. Didn't capture enough info to look it up later.

Hawkweed. Suck down the orange while it's still around.

Today is a special day. Sweetpea and I have been legally wed for eleven, count 'em eleven years.

In celebration, let's observe others celebrating togetherness.

First from one side, then from the other:

A little syrphid fly action for ya. Hubba hubba. Happy anniversary, love!

scratch and sniff frogs and origami seed baskets

Every once in a while, you need to pull the refrigerator away from the corner and clean the floor underneath it. The only remedy for having done so, is going outside with the camera. So this afternoon, we visited the little wetland across the road. The water’s low, and we only spotted one frog, and one tadpole.

This, I believe, is a green frog (Lithobates clamitans), not to be confused with its northern cousin, the mink frog (Lithobates septentrionalis), which you can identify by its scent of rotten onions. It’s the “scratch-and-sniff” frog. See, had I known that ahead of time, think of the fun we would have had!

Sunflowers: good for the soul.

And now for musk mallow.

Sweetpea refers to this as an origami seed basket.

I defy you to come up with a better design.

Indeed, it’s hard to improve on mother nature.

I should have taken basket weaving

Recent snail sightings – species unknown, but Oxyloma retusum seems like a possibility.
On goldenrod leaves:


In the husk of musk mallow seed cases:


On a stalk of curly dock:


On jewelweed leaves:


Speaking of musk mallow seed cases, aren’t they gorgeous?

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?

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…