fourth time around

Hello world. Yes, it has been days, I know. Question: what do you get when you cross a blackberry and a cigarette?

One of these things. I vaguely remember learning what this is a few years ago. But I forget. For some reason the name “horsetail” comes to mind. This is a couple of feet tall. They grow in segments, with prominent joints every so often:

For the most part, these are single stalks with just the one terminal flower cluster, but there was this enterprising soul:

I have just visited The Google, and I have learned all sorts of fascinating things about horsetail (Equisetum arvens). Yep, that’s what this is. In the summer, each of those joints has a gazillion threadlike leaves sticking out of it.  And? Apparently it synthesizes nicotine, under polluted conditions. So my twisted mind isn’t that far off-base after all, is it.
We also have a bunch of awesomely huge shelf mushrooms to show off today:

That big one on the top is fannnnntastic. Check this out:

Damn.
Say, don’t you find yourself wondering how to tell the difference between this year’s crop of sensitive fern spore stalks and last year’s? I know I do.

New at left, old at right. Oh hey, you can see the shelf mushrooms in the background.

New: still bunched up tight.

Old: each little…bud? it’s not technically a bud, but it sure looks like a bud – has opened up already.
And now for the color commentary.

Rosebud. You thought it was a sled. Think again.

Rosehips.


Willows have a different color strategy.


Since I’m on a primary color kick, here’s some sky, with bonus moon.
Last but not least,  I’ve gone and registered for my fourth half marathon! Woot woot!

Yes, California is a long way from Vermont, but I’ll be running this with my Fabulous Sister-in-Law, who got me through my first half marathon a year and a half ago. Last year, for this same weekend, I did the the Pittsburgh, which was great and all, but this one will be even better because there is a wine festival immediately afterward.

spring peeper, ripening jewel weed, dive bombing dragonfly

The half marathon – the first-ever Monadnock Half Marathon – last Saturday went pretty well. It was hot and humid, and after about four or five miles I began feeling like my head was on fire. I ran with a nurse from the chemo unit where I volunteer every week giving Reiki to people – somehow I conned Carol, who’d never even done a 5K before this year, into giving this a shot. She was a champ! Every time we got to a water station, I poured half a cup of water over my head and drank the rest.
At about mile 10.5 we came to a pretty big hill – comparable to the steepest one I’ve got along my regular routes – which normally, I run up. (“Run” in the liberal sense of the word. A decent speed walker would overtake me.) But all of us within sight took this hill at a walk. Fortunately, it was pretty much downhill from mile 11 to the end.  And whaddaya know, I beat my previous best time by a handful of minutes. Although I trained to do just that, I’d given up hope of making a decent time when we went through that ghastly heat wave a few weeks ago and I realized the inherent silliness of trying to set a personal record in New England, in August, on a hilly course. VICTORY!
That was my third half marathon. The next one is an informal one this fall on Hilton Head, when I’ll be on vacation with my family. It won’t be a USTAF-certified course – it will be whatever my brother, sister-in-law, and I invent, and we’ll just persuade my mom, my sister, and sweet Kevin into standing in strategic places with water bottles.
Yesterday I lounged about indolently. Today, while hunting for monarch caterpillars, I found someone else entirely hiding under the wavy curve of a milkweed leaf:

It’s a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer)!  This completely made my day. He was panting quite visibly, so I zoomed in a made a short film of it. Naturally, he stopped breathing while I filmed, and – trying to hold the camera steady – so did I. It was a frog vs human show down. He won. I stopped filming, and he resumed breathing.

This is what a black-eyed susan looks like when it’s all done flowering.
New species alert! This is boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum):

It’s similar to joe-pye weed – different leaf configuration, but same general idea – only it’s white, instead of pink. How many petals would you guess these flowers have?

Answer: five. They’re joined together in little cups, and the stringy things are presumably the stamens.
There’s a disturbing amount of purple loosestrife in the wet areas. Disturbing, because they outcompete the native cattails.

They’re pretty, sure…but evil.


I came across this dead dive bombing dragonfly.

Isn’t that wild?
Oh, I lied, I did do something yesterday. I’d noticed a big branch had fallen into the brook that we cross over to get to our house, so yesterday we waded in and dragged it up onto the bank…where I noticed a whole SLEW of jack-in-the-pulpits. We positioned the branch to not squash any of them. Today I went back with the camera.

That’s the branch in the background.
OK, back to today. My other goal for today (aside from finding monarch caterpillars – FAIL), was to capture the moment when a jewel weed flower opens. Victory! Let’s review:
Not Yet Open:


Open:


VICTORY! Just opening up!


And, another time-lapse special, here we have bud to seed, all on one plant.

Let’s have a closer look:

I found a whole slew of sensitive fern spores, still green:

Like money in the bank.
And got another new-to-me species, willow herb perhaps Epilobium coloratum.



In other news, the roundleaved dogwood berries have been ripening. July 5 – they were still green.

A month later, the berries are ripening and stems going red


And just a few days later, they’re nearly all BLUE!

here, have a rainbow

day lily


honeysuckle

orange hawkweed


calendula


black-eyed susan


katydid nymph

sensitive fern, fertile front thereof


possibly blue-eyed grass. never was quite sure about this one.


morning glory


thistle


siberian iris

sensitive feet, sensitive fern

This morning did not start off well. Two words: plantar fasciitis. A first for me. For those of you who aren’t runners, this is when the band of tissue along the bottom of your foot becomes inflamed, no doubt due to the runner foolishly never stretching and having racked up too many miles, too quickly, for 1/2 marathon #2 of the season, just a week and two days away from now, but who’s counting.
The symptom of PF is, you wake up at 5:45 am for a quick pee, stand up, and feel like someone drove a nail up through your heel. Yeah, that was my introduction to the day.
Things improved: it was a Reiki-at-the-hospital day, and I worked with a woman who, though interested in the general idea of being connected to healing energy, hates having people touch her. “Just not my thing,” she confessed. “No problem!” answered I. “I’ll do a distant healing on you.” So I squirreled myself away in a spare room and sent her a treatment from 20 feet away with a wall between us. VICTORY!
And then I hung out with a friend who is even more nuts about Nature than I am (in the sense that she is not content to visit her wild flora friends. She eats them. She had milkweed shoots for dinner the other night.) She was happy to accompany me on my usual dawdling mailbox run.
I spotted something I have always longed to see: the fertile fronds of sensitive fern when they are shiny and new and still green.VICTORY #2!



Rest assured, you’ll be seeing more of this guy in the coming weeks.
We seem to have a lot of hop hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana) right by the brook.

 
These are its fruits. Thank you, zoom lens!