can’t unsee it

As I edited this photo I discovered that almost every one of these juniper berries has a little alien face on it. Now I can’t unsee it, and neither can you. Sorry, but I like the photo, so you are stuck with alien juniper faces stuck somewhere in your brains. There are worse things . . .

Eastern red cedar, aka eastern juniper (Juniperus virginiana)

noticeably shorter days

Can you feel the days getting shorter? We are only ten days from daylight savings. We have less than 11 hours of daylight now in Minneapolis. In two months from today, on the winter solstice, we will have exactly three hours less daylight than today. Wowza, that feels fast to me for some reason. Anyway, this dahlia, to me, embodies the sun. I think I will put it on my bookshelf as a talisman of spring’s returning warmth.

I put this dahlia in the dehydrator. It was one of those plate sized flowers. Dried it is the size of my palm.

my dehydrator tray

I am putting as much as I can, as fast I can, into our dehydrator at the moment. It’s jawd-roppingly beautiful our there right now, and I am trying to capture as much as I can so I have materials to play with this winter. It’s the STILL equivalent of “money in the bank.” This was my finished (dried) tray from today. The colors caught my attention as I carried the tray upstairs from the banned-to-the-basement dehydrator, so I slid the whole things right onto my black background and shot it as is.

For the curious, this trayful holds: orange dahlias, fall lilac flowers and leaves, ginkgo leaves, Meyer lemon tree leaves, cabbage leaves, honey locust leaves, one hydrangea floret, one oak leaf, two crabapples, a couple stray sumac leaves, and some dried dogwood leaves.

collection of dried flora in mid-October in Minnesota

an exquisite gift in a doggie poop bag

The other day I woke to message (a DM) in Instagram. It said: “Hi excuse my DM, but I dropped a little green bag on top of your mailbox with some of my prized big leaf magnolia tree pods (not poo ). The tree is magnificent, and the fruit starts off bright pink and then opens up to reveal this bright red seeds. It’s a bigleaf magnolia.”

I am glad she told me it wasn’t an actual poo bag, because I would have totally thought someone set it down on our mailbox to tie a shoe and then forgot it; we have a lot of walkers going around the lake. For me, this is a perfect gift. And an exquisite seedpod.

bigleaf magnolia seedpods (Magnolia macrophylla)

a head the size of a planet

I used to tell my son Joseph that I wouldn’t let him play hockey or football because he had a brain the size of planet it it was too valuable to risk in high school contact sports. That was years before we knew about the very serious long-term effects of repeated concussions and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. I was joking when I said it 18 years ago, but boy oh boy. One of those awful times when there is no satisfaction in being right.

Well, shoot. I don’t like being a Debbie Downer, and I know many of you start your day with STILL. So let’s close today’s post by contemplating the massive fertility of this single sunflower head “the size of a planet.” And this after the flower itself spent all of late summer being beautiful and following the path of the sun in the sky.

sunflower seedhead in autumn