exuberance

these joyful weeds have been waving at me along the edge of my driveway as i come and go lately. after eight years of STILL blog, i’ve learned the names of most of the plants in my immediate environment, especially the eye-catching ones. but somehow this one has escaped my previous attention. i spent 20 minutes photographing it, and then an hour trying to identify it with no success. any of you recognize this one?

unidentified weed

*the leaves look like they are in the carrot family, but i don’t think it’s wild carrot nor hemlock. the plant is about 18 inches high. it’s growing in the edge of our shady woodlot. and the stem round.

good design takes time

the ginkgo, like horsetail, is a living fossil dating back 270 million years. when i consider the perfect form of the leaves, one of my favorite of all deciduous trees, i am not at all surprised that is took a little time. perfection takes patience.

ginkgo leaves

grenade

this beautiful bivalve made it to the shore without having all of its spikes worn off. it looks like one of those hand grenades that sometimes wash up on beaches in the english channel. i felt a little nervous picking it up.

cockle shell

busy beetles

i do love imagining sometimes what you might be thinking as you pull up STILL blog for another day, not having any idea what you might see, and i love imagining what your first thought might be when the image resolves on your screens.

beetle eaten skeleton leaf

agility and speed

when i was an aerospace engineer, one of the things i learned was that you could design an aircraft for agility, or you could design for speed. but it was impossible to get both the “fastest” and the “most agile” in the same vehicle. at some point, you would have to pick which of the two you were optimizing for. somehow, dragonflies seem to be the exception. my son informed me recently that dragonflies have a 95% success rate when it comes to hunting prey. they are the single most successful hunters of the animal kingdom. the next closest comes in at a 60-something success rate. and why are they so successful? they are both incredibly fast, and incredibly agile. 1 + 1 = 3.

dragonfly