STILL here

the speeding up and slowing down of time gets more pronounced the older you get. june arrived and ended in lightening speed this year. blue bird skies and 80 degree days. long evenings on the deck. uninterrupted lush green foliage creating a canopy over the house and framing our long views of the lake. one day bleeds into the next. it seems the only thing that changed this month was the calling of frogs being replaced by the twinkling of fireflies. it’s months like these that toy with your mind, and make you believe that summer might just last forever.

suspended on a thread

lots and lots of thigh-high roadside grasses right now–a northern summer is a fertile place. what caught my attention with these guys was those heavy seed-heads dangling at the end of those hair-thin filaments. yes, i like prairie grasses almost as much as i like using dashes. 😂

smooth brome grass (Bromus inermis)

floating

there are days when i think i could be very happy tethered to solid ground while i float on the surface, staring up at the sky.

water lily (Nymphaea leibergii)

linnaeus gets an update

my routine when i post here on STILL blog is to pull up and read the wiki page on my subject before i begin writing. in the ten years since i have started STILL i have noticed a very interesting trend: as genetic testing has become more and more routine, our linnaeus taxonomy of plants, based historically on close observation, are being updated and reclassified with increasing regularity. by example, here is the wiki page for milkweed:

The genus contains over 200 species distributed broadly across Africa, North America, and South America. It previously belonged to the family Asclepiadaceae, which is now classified as the subfamily Asclepiadoideae of the dogbane family, Apocynaceae.

when i started STILL, i rarely saw entries like this. now, i think i see them maybe 30% of the time. sometimes, like above, whole new families need to be created, and sometimes it is just a modification of the genus or species. it’s interesting to think about–an entire genetic mapping of all the flora and fauna of the world has quietly been happening over the past decade.

milkweed in bloom (Asclepias)

everlasting torch of summer

a close-up of one of yesterday’s musk thistles. i see a torch, the torch on the statue of liberty to be specific. the olympic torches are too sleek. the thorny bracts on this musk thistle look like the filigreed observation platform on the original statue of liberty torch. musk thistle–an everlasting torch of summer.

musk thistle flower (Carduus nutans)