back to school

Welcome to September. While most of you are reading this post, I will taking my son to the airport for his LAST semester of undergraduate studies at New York University (NYU). If you have been reading along this summer, you will probably be able to intuit how much I will miss him and how sad I am: My foraging buddy, my kitchen companion, my mustard making summer side-kick. On the other hand, Steve and I have been holding our breath until we could get out from under the weight of paying college tuition. So it is a bittersweet day indeed. The older I get, the more I come to see the vast majority of life as bittersweet. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of purely sweet days, and just as many deeply bitter days. But the majority seem (to me) to fall in the middle–a little of both–bittersweet.

black mustard (Brassica nigra)

Capturing the green before it’s gone!

I am just back from Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. I’ll tell you all about its awesomeness this week, but right now, dinner is about to be served so I am keeping this short and sweet. As I think I mentioned, Steve is on an assignment to write a story on hazelnuts. The hazelnuts in our area are ripe now, and Steve has been visiting farms and the U of M all week helping with the harvest. Today, we took a walk to check on some wild American hazelnut bushes we found near us, and I happened upon this new-to-me fern in the wild: Royal fern! My very reliable Minnesota plant resource tells me this a native fern. But Wiki says it is native to Europe and the Mediterranean. I got confused. But on further investigation, it looks like genetic testing is reclassifying many of the sub-species/varietals as I type. From what I could glean–this is indeed a native son.

Royal Fern (Osmunda regalis)

not even September yet

It is not even September yet, and there are signs of fall everywhere. The cattail tips are yellow and starting to curl. The musk thistle stems are completely done. The enormous burdocks have died back and are setting their giant velcro burrs. And yet, several plants are still blooming as if it’s spring: the goldenrod, the asters, and sunflowers. We are heading into a transition season. And transition seasons are my favorite.

spent musk thistle stem

Today is the day!

After all that hoo-ha about my keynote: today is the day I finally give it. The 112 conference attendees and I will have spent 5 days together, with several other instructors, at Longwood Gardens. I did a similar trip with the organization (called Out of Chicago) last August at Chicago Botanic. Last summer, I was still very much recovering from the house fire. On top of it all Jack the puggle–my beloved sidekick of 17 years–died while I was at the conference. And, yet, even with all that upheaval, I knew that this conference was/is special. It is a self-selecting group that signs up for a 5-day garden photography conference after all. So I chose this image of the dried daylilies because I think the colors look royal and the up-stretched petals triumphal–in other words celebratory!

dehydrator dried daylilies (Hemerocallis)

a composition like no other

Et voila! Yesterday’s musk mallow leaves used in a different context. These are musk mallow and smoke bush leaves. The over-under on the smoke bush leaves is more pronounced than I recall from previous years. But I also pressed them much earlier in the summer than I usually do. The regular ovoid shapes the of the smoke bush leaves, and the snowflake like detail of the cutleaf mallows makes for an interesting combination imho.

pressed leaves of the musk mallow (Malva moschata) with pressed smoke bush leaves (Cotinus)