failure can be beautiful

I must have had settings on the camera a little off today without realizing it. But you know what? I find these pictures beautiful anyway. Without further ado…

Eastern blue eyed grass – a whole rash of which popped out yesterday.

Vinca aka myrtle.

Another vinca, just starting to unfold.

daffodil.


Black-eyed Susan. Scrum-diddly-umptious. I hope everyone’s having a great weekend!

flowers in November, seed dissection, wrecked mushrooms: a good day

Attentive readers may have noticed that I’ve been a bit glum about the onset of fall this year – certain that the fun was over, there’s nothing to see here, move along, move along, see you next spring. Fortunately, the woods behind our house have been whispering to me over the past couple of weeks. “Pssssst.  Lady. Up here. Mushrooms. Mosses. Things you haven’t seen lately. Pssssst.”

(Am I the only one out there who perceives life this way?) (Oh, right: doesn’t matter. You’re in charge of your perceptions; I’m in charge of mine.)

Anyhoo, I wandered around today, some in the normal spots, and some up in the woods, attentive to those little whispers. Here’s the haul:

Pachysandra, invading the woods from its homebase around the magnolia tree. We last saw pachysandra on May 6th, when the flowers were forming and dare I say it, swelling.

Asters continue to delight with their fuzzballs.

The pieris bush. This is the one whose flowers look like spider-infested barnacles. And there is a bug, of some kind, right in the middle of the picture. Thank you, O Macro Lens, without thee this bush would just be a blob on the edge of the lawn.

Would somebody please tell the vinca that it’s friggin’ November already?

Screw you, says the vinca. I can do this all week. I’m not proud…or tired.

Spider sez, mind your own business. See that little thingy in the lower right? Stay tuned. Those things are EVERYWHERE.

I came across a lobelia, of the Indian Tobacco flavor (Lobelia inflata), on my way up into the woods.

Lovely inflated calyx, to use the verbiage in my flower guide.

No wait, really? You didn’t get the memo, either, huh? Wow. I’ll keep an eye on this, because I’m not sure if it’s just opening up, or just closing down. When open, the lobelia flowers I’ve seen around here look more like this.

Remember the mushrooms growing in a stump up the hill? Well, someone went to town on them. I am not sure if mushrooms spontaneously fall apart, or if critters are involved, but at any rate, check this out:

Carnage, either way.

I spent a fair amount of time sussing out the mystery of a tiny turkey-foot shaped object that I have noticed in the bazillions over recent weeks. They’re everywhere – on the deck, on leaves, on our shower mat…

Here’s one.

I have suspected the birch trees, just on general principle. But I’m not sure if it’s yellow, gray, or white birch. (We have all three. Plus there’s black birch generally around here, but not in my usual wanderings.)

Look, another one.

I finally figured out that that’s probably the conveyance part, and the actual seed is this thing:

(A double-duty photo. Please to admire the fantastic shroomage.)

I also discovered that if you take an innocent birch catkin…

…and rip it to shreds, you’ll see that my theory is more-or-less right.

Here we have the two bits still stuck together.

As exciting as this is (and isn’t it?) the best part was when I came across a stump I visited earlier in the summer. It’s completely covered in moss and canada mayflower. I realized that even though the mayflower has long since produced its flowers and berries, it’s still around, and once I knew what to look for, I saw the evidence everywhere.

 

Translucent white leaves are all that remain.

On the way back down to the house, I found the first gentian I ever saw – here’s what it looked like back on August 9th – it didn’t have flowers yet.

And here’s what that baby looks like now:

I’m not dead yet!

The running report: Achilles tendonitis notwithstanding, a girl’s got to run, and the next half marathon is coming up in a few months. Which reminds me, I should probably register for it before it’s too late. I knocked out what passes for a long run these days – 5.3 miles – and right around now, the cats are starting to pester me for dinner. So, sports fans, I’ll see you tomorrow.

youth to old age, in a single day; the virtues of a good book

We have a lot happening simultaneously these days.
1. withering.  As the our northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun, more and more plants are closing up shop for the season. Are the ferns as beautiful as they wither as they were in the spring?

Today.

May 21

You tell me.
2. making babies as fast as they can I went into the Mystery Woodland – scene of many an early-spring flower – this afternoon. I’d neglected to visit it for quite some time: I’ll have to do better next year. Lo and behold, I found some helleborine (Epipactis helloborine) and its fatty seeds. I wanted to linger but the mosquitos (again: WTF?!) were killing me.


Also in this category: wild grape, species unknown, irritatingly out of reach high up in an apple tree.


Next up: plantain. A lawn weed to most, but remember, this is the one with the fantastic purple flowers.

The awesome flowers, a month ago today, as it happens…

…are now getting alarmingly ready to pop.

3. Still flowering – as I’ve mentioned recently… there’s always the asters. This time, the “little purple kind” as opposed to yesterday’s “big purple kind”. I love how some are yellow in the middle, and some are purple. Seems to be a reasonably common feature of asters.

Also, a common-enough little guy I’d kinda been ignoring, but it’s one of the few spots of color left these days:

This is wood sorrel – probably Oxalis europaea. This is the one I always thought of as related to clover (same three-cute-leaves) except for those leaves look like they’re been folded in half. Mother nature sure does love the five-petaled-yellow-flowers.
Remember vinca? It’s a ground cover with shiny dark green leaves. It was flowering back in May. I managed to completely forget to look for what its seeds look like. Well, I may yet get my chance, because I found a few flowers today. Today! Late September!

Oops, that was a little blurry.
And the foliage of primrose looks practically edible, it’s so fresh. It hasn’t gotten the memo yet about winter being on the way.


I have to confess: I spent more time on the couch, doing this:

Happy sigh. This is one author whose stuff we automatically buy, in hardcover, the second it comes out, sight unseen, advance reviews unread. He wrote it, we’ll read it. Pretty simple. Were that all of life were that simple.

the turtles hatched! the turtles hatched!

I was waaaayyyyy too tired after Saturday’s lawnmowing extravaganza to contemplate doing my 14 mile run yesterday – I figured I’d do it today, instead. Yesterday, I just kind of lazed around in a mental fog, feeling alternately vaguely guilty on the one hand, and accepting of reality on the other. I managed to do laundry – that was about it. As I headed up to bed last night, I checked today’s calendar, almost on a whim. Whoops: I’d made plans to visit with a friend who lives an hour and a half away, who’s moving to Wisconsin… tomorrow. Totally spaced on it. It would be my last chance to see her and her family for an unspecified amount of time.
Time to cowboy up! I set the alarm two hours early and naturally, barely slept as a result. Alas for my whiny self – I know from experience that lack of sleep does not seem to influence the quality of a run. So, despite my completely unfocused eyes, I headed out the door and within two minutes of running, came across this wonderful, wonderful thing: 

25 freshly hatched turtle eggs! At first I panicked, thinking some evil monster (perhaps of the raccoon variety?) had found and devoured breakfast. But I saw no footprints…other than deer, a couple hundred yards away. Deer: well-known enemy of the baby turtle…? I think not. This is right on the side of the road here, and the green stuff is pretty much growing IN one of the tributaries to our pond – the one that runs parallel to the road. Thus, the babies didn’t have to cross the road to get to water…

…which is good, given that in the past few days I’ve seen not one, but two, dead baby snapping turtles on the side of the road, about a half mile south of where these nests were.
The run, incidentally, was great – 14 miles in 2 hours, 32 minutes. It was slower than my incredible speedy gonzalez 12-miler a couple of weeks ago, but I was plenty satisfied.
My friend has been living up in New Hampsha, where they still have lilacs in bloom.

(Yes, there’s a bug in there.)

Some of their daylilies are just thinking about opening…

…others ARE open.
I have deeply exciting news on the buttercup front. You know me: I love the intermediate stages, the whole lovely unfolding process of things. In the case of the buttercup flower, here is what I’d already discovered:

We’ll call this one, “before”.

…and this one, “after”.
Welcome to “intermediate”

The seeds in the center are half-baked, not unlike the cheesecake currently living in the refrigerator.
AND, in other exciting news, I saw some Canada mayflower forming berries. We have a ton of these ourselves, but they’re buried in ferns, goldenrods, and nameless shrubbery I have yet to identify – they’re basically completely inaccessible at this point.
Don’t be fooled by those leaves, they’re vinca.
Let’s play, spot the bug:

Clover. Over to the right center is the bug.
Time for some orange porn:


That cheesecake? It’s an early birthday present to the love of my life, he of the horrendous allergies who is currently one big pile of sneeze over on the other side of the room. (He mowed our lawn today and got walloped with grassiness.) I’ll bet that cheesecake will still taste good, baby!

the big picture and the small picture

I had a marathon conversation with my best friend today – I call her my wife, which gets confusing, since this blog is named “musings from dave” and there’s no Dave in sight and I’m a girl married to a guy named Kevin. (New here? Here’s who Dave is.) ANYHOW. Long conversation. With the camera in hand. This is what happened while we were having ourselves a good soul spring cleaning.

“I’m in jail!”

Oh, no I’m not.

(Actually, this is part of what we were talking about. How to get the screen out of the way. The human dilemma: we get to choose our own perceptions, which means, rats, we’re responsible for ourselves. You know, you can be the bug, you can be the windshield, something like that.)

Let’s be naughty and go out on the roof.

You get a lovely view from the point of no return. Or so Terry Pratchett says.

Ho hum. Back to ground level we go…

For the record: On May 7, 2010, the last of the magnolia blossoms was about to drop. This year, they’re just starting to open, still, after a couple of days hanging out like this:

I guess they’re savoring the sun. I should start a betting pool on when we get x (say, 50?) percent of them wide open. Any takers?

The aliens lilac flowers are coming along nicely. They appreciate the sun – it was rainy for two days before today.

OK, we’re entering the Woodland Mystery now.

‘Tis guarded by the venerable yellow birch, here seen with some of its retinue of admirers. Seriously, there’s a whole pile of wildflowers at the base of this tree, most of which appear on this blog somewhere or other.

The butternut (white walnut, Juglans cinerea) that skulks at the side of that birch. Is it just me, or do you see the main leaf in the middle having a conversation with the leaf on the right? “Well, I never!” Oh wow – see how much this has opened up just since yesterday?

Also in the retinue a the base of the yellow birch: I used to think this was a sessile-leaf bellwort before it it big enough for me to see the wee little buds forming in the axils with the leaves. Whoops! This makes it look like Solomon Seal (actual, not false), but it’s so tiny… (maybe three inches tall.) I guess a big plant has to start off tiny at some point, right? I guess I’m having a learning experience here.

Into the leaf litter and sea of vinca we go. I tried HARD to get a shot of a spent birch catkin that shows that the little bits are arranged in a spiral down the length of the catkin, but I just couldn’t capture it. So you’ll just have to believe me. It’s something I didn’t notice until I started playing with one that had fallen. It makes sense from a design point of view – it’s like a tightly coiled spring, a way to get a lot of materiel organized for rapid deployment.

Pretty sure this is starflower, so…where’s the flower? (There “should” be a stalk coming out of the center where the leaves meet…) (Maybe they’re like Canada mayflower and take two years to come to full throttle?)

Pachysandra, making inroads from its headquarters at the base of the magnolia, into the vinca-dominated woodland mystery. I almost didn’t take this picture, but I’m glad I did, because you can see the bases of the flower bits swelling up, compared to when I first saw them.

A shy vinca.

Charlie comes along for the ride. That bright green to the far right is the pachysandra’s base of operations.

In the meantime, on the west side of the house, the snail ferns plot their next move. Another spiral. Nature’s awfully sneaky.

We have a sea of vinca over there, as well. Hooray!

This is how a beech responds when you cut it down. A hell of stump sprouts. This will take several years of disciplined cutting back to starve out, I think. I know that sounds mean! But this tree was too close to the addition’s footprint – its branches would have overhung the roof. So down it came.

Oh hey, that’s where I stopped. Hope you’re having a lovely day, wherever you are!