Roy G
Are you ready for fall? I am jumping the gun a little bit, but I did get off the freeway today in order to inch my way back on a frontage road so I could grab these very-first-of-the-fall-colors. Have you ever seen so many colors on one (compound) leaf? Red, orange, yellow, and green: Roy G. is here already!
staghorn sumac leaves in late August (Rhus typhina)
a freebie in a floral bouquet
My friend Kristin and I share a “flower CSA”. Every week, bouquets of locally grown flowers are dropped off at restaurant/market that is a mile from my house. Kris and I alternate weeks. This week, my bouquet had several stalks of these blue hued glasses, presumably wheat. They are quite pretty. I put this photo into Google image search, and it said it was very likely Utrecht Blue wheat. Any grass/grain experts out there? Tall grasses, both wild and domesticated, are one of my biggest areas of weakness. Every year, I try to commit one or two more species to my mental data base, but for some reason they barely stick: big bluestem, indiangrass, turkey foot grass, canada rye, wild barley, switchgrass, quackgrass, foxtail grasses, squirrel tail grasses, brome, gramma, wild oats…on and on and on. I just googled native grasses of Minnesota, and I found a resource that lists 159 species of grasses. At 3 new-to-me species a year, I’d need to live to age 115 to learn the all. I had better up my average!
blue hued wheat stem (perhaps Utrecht Blue Spring Wheat?)
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Why not just ask the CSA farmer what it is? Great idea to share a flower CSA with a friend!
As a gal in her 81st year, I find remembering new plant names is a real challenge these days. Even at your tender age, memory skill is on an unfavorable trajectory, M’dear. Better up that age of 115 to achieve your goal, heh heh.reply
time of swelling
Everything is maturing, swelling, darkening…in a word, ripening. Including the milkweed seed pods. One of my all time fav seedpods.
Common milkweed seed pods (Asclepias syriaca)
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As child these pods fascinated me, they still do
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3,5,7
When I teach flat-lay composition classes (yes, believe it or not people want such a thing!), one of the techniques I teach is “3,5,7.” In other words, the power of odd numbers in a composition. Any gardener will be familiar with the concept, but a surprising number of creatives are not. Two of anything will always make a line in the mind. Four will almost always make a square. But for whatever reason, odd numbers do not do the same thing in the brain: we don’t see distracting pentagons in our minds eye (lol). We simply see a grouping. Thus I offer you three, not four, summer sunflowers.
three varieties of August sunflowers
almost anodized
Wow! Right? This is nothing more than a dried leaf from the Peace Lily I inherited from my neighbor after her mother’s funeral. It has been sitting, neglected, on my deck all summer. I passive aggressively stopped watering it several weeks ago because I couldn’t keep up with its water demands. So needy! So I let it go. And the leaves dried and now look like this. Wow, right?
dried Peace Lily leaf (Spathiphyllum)
