spot the bugs

Day lily leaves, showing how the weather’s been lately. Hey, does anyone else remember print ads for Bausch and Lomb contact lenses from the ‘80’s?
Ode to a Dandelion, Part Deux:

And yesterday’s patch of coltsfoot…

…today, almost every one of these is a dirty gray puffball. I missed it! Rats! I guess it happens pretty quickly.
Other flowers open more slowly, so we can enjoy ‘em at our leisure. To wit: the lilacs.

The apple trees in our yard are starting to open up.  When I visited my friend Craig over the weekend – here’s another shameless plug for Half Crown Hill Orchard – he and his wife explained how apples generate a cluster bomb of five buds at a go, with the “king” blossom in the center. They might not have used the phrase “cluster bomb” – that sounds like something I might have made up. I’d never noticed that before, so imagine my delight when I saw this:



Still no luck identifying Random Lawn Weed:

Thin, skinny, alternating leaves; behaves kind of like a vine. Anybody have a clue?

And now for something truly exciting. I think I may have found some wild ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) today. Or possibly red baneberry (Actaea rubra). It’s exciting – well, it’s exciting to me, either way – but it’s theoretically additionally exciting if it’s ginseng, as mean people have been known to poach ginseng for sale on the herbal market.

Ignore the sensitive fern at lower left. (It won’t mind, despite its name. That’s actually its name – “sensitive fern”). What you want to see here is – one long stalk, that splits into three, with compound (more-than-one-leaf-per-stem) leaves on each of the three stems. And you also want to notice the separate stalk, coming up seemingly from at-or-below-ground-level, that similarly splits three ways, with a cluster of flowers at the tip of each one.

Here’s the flower stalk action.

Cute, eh?

I tried and failed to get a look at the emerging flower.
[Editor's Note: this is probably actually wild sarsaparilla - Aralia nudicaulis)

Oh, we’re not NEARLY done yet. Let’s have a look at fern naughty bits spores.

The solomon’s seal flowers are finally finally finally starting to pop.


Here’s some more on the decline and fall of the magnolia blossoms (sob!)


Just in time for the azalea nearby to start blooming:

And now for the macabre. Have you been watching for bugs so far, in this post? Because there have been three so far. This next one is hard to miss. We’re on a fern.

She’s embalming her victim in a cocoon. Don’t believe me?

*slurp.*

Moving right along!

We have a great boulder on the edge of the lawn. It’s a whole planet unto itself.

I keep spotting new jack-in-the-pulpits. I’m just as thrilled as I was the first time I ever saw one. I mean, who INVENTS this stuff?



Miterwort (Mitella dyphilla). These are hard to photograph – they’re TINY (maybe at most a quarter inch wide?) and, the mosquitos are out in this spot of the woods. I make a lot of sacrifices for this blog…I sure hope y’all appreciate it.
As for the bugs…here they are (minus the dining spider)…

mistakes and explosions

Bluets. Somehow I love this shot even more because it’s out of focus.

It’s amazing what pops up when you haven’t yet had to mow the lawn. No idea what this is.

We last saw the unidentified sapling I’ve been calling mystery witch on May 4th.  I am dismayed at what I missed over the past week, since I forgot to check in with it since the 6th.  

May 4th at left, and today at right. A riot of compound leaves. I swear, you miss just a few days around here and you'll be totally lost. Sheesh. Incidentally, I now realize that what I thought was an ash sapling yesterday is the same thing as this mystery witch – I only came across that guy when it had already leafed out, so I missed seeing it at the bud stage. But I thought to take pictures of mystery witch’s tinier buds today, and guess what?
 
The official mystery witch sample at left; the probably-not-actually-an-ash-from-yesterday at right. They look the same to me…
Onwards! Let’s break the rules and shoot into the sun.

I love doing this.

My current vote for Solomon’s Seal. The little pods are getting fatter. I don’t think they’ve flowered yet…stay tuned, I guess!
Another friend I neglected for a few days who’s suddenly all grown up – this is positively shameful, how I missed the day-by-day of this one:

At left, an ash sapling in the rain on April 5, and at right, that same sapling today.

Crazy explosive, huh? Here’s another example of crazy explosive, this time with the lilacs.

May 5th at left and today at right. Yowza. Another six inches of stalk and ancillary side bits have sprung up outta nowhere. In the meantime…

…the more established sprays of lilac flowers are just starting to show what they’ve been thinking about, color-wise.

and there is on last hold-out set of buds that are just now joining the party.

Remember her? It’s so easy, when the flowers start to fade, to forget about them. But they’re still quite busy! They’re developing seeds. So when I remember to, I like to check back in. I still don’t know what this is.
Onwards to the running report.
I did a simple half-hour run today – I’m in tapering mode for the half-marathon, which is happening THIS SUNDAY. Gulp. Today’s run was slower than what I’m used to, and painful – also something I’m not used to. 
On the one hand, I should be in decent shape – I’ve followed my training plan religiously, a plan I know from experience works, and all of my long runs have been eminently doable – no thoughts of quitting or throwing in the towel.
But on the other hand, the recent combination of a lot of ‘gardening’ (by which I mean killing innocent saplings and not-so-innocent raspberry canes) has made me sore in places I didn’t know I had. I overdid it with yoga last week. And then I did that 5K at quite a clip – maybe not such a good idea so close to race day. I don’t feel up to it right this second. I will by Sunday and I expect and hope it will be fine, but right this second? I repeat, “gulp”.
Happy International Monty Python Day!