punks

when we were kids we used to light long smoldering incense looking rods that would burn down slowly like a cigarette. we called them “punks,” and instead of lighting new matches for every round of firecrackers, we could just touch our punks to  the firecracker fuses and set them off. cattail seedheads look just like those old-fashioned fuse lighters, and i have just discovered that cattail seedheads are called, you guessed it, punks.

turtle lake, shoreview, minnesota

in the wings

the oranges are gathering in the wings, peering around the curtains at the gathered crowd, waiting for their cue to burst onstage and be the stars of the next few months before the snow flies.

mountain ash and lilies

unrelated but related

so what does a beautiful blue spike of salvia have to do with an eames lounge chair? nothing at all except that we had the opportunity to see both of them this afternoon. in the midst of a re-envisioning of the interior of our house just now, we went to look at a used 1987 eames lounge chair at the home of a charming woman in west bloomington, mn, who also raises seven different kinds of native milkweed from seed each year, and who drew my attention to this gorgeous blue salvia in her front yard just as a bee landed on one of the petals. of course, we bought the chair.

blue salvia

bloomington, minnesota

the rules have changed

my husband and son brought this plant home from a trout fishing expedition. hey, we have a plant for you to photograph, they said. so i brought out my 4×4 black tagboard and a camera, then watched them drag a six foot tall plant like a lacy bamboo tree out the hatchback of our car. well, i thought. the rules have changed. fortunately we just painted the exterior of our house black. so i had steve stand like a sentinel with his right arm extended horizontally, holding a plant as tall as himself, as i snapped a few dozen photos of this freak of nature.

wild angelica

tiling

as a former aerospace engineer, i see this fish and i think about the space shuttle. that’s totally normal, right? i mean the fish’s scales shed water aerodynamically (sorry, i mean hydrodynamically) in the same way that the space shuttle’s tiles used to shed the 2300 degree F heat of re-entry. its all just good engineering. we as a species are very good engineers. but you know who is a better engineer? her name is evolution.

loup de mer (mediterranean sea bass)