flowers
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Little Brown Jug
Arrowleaf or heartleaf ginger, also known as little brown jug (Hexastylis arifolia). You can see the arrow and heart inspiration, but what’s with the jugs?As in wild ginger (Asarum canadense), a related plant, the action is at ground-level. The little brown jugs (LBJs?) are flowers that start out green and age brown. While these particular…
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Don’t Know Jack?
Someone hath browsed off the overhanging spathes and tips of the spadicies of these Jack-in-the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum). This gives us a good view of the pin-striped goodness within these curious flowers.Otherwise you have to get personal.This is a flower that hides itself.Who is this Jack, you might well ask, and what is he doing in…
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Trillium erectum
We only saw these purple trilliums on the return leg of our walk. The invasive Japanese Barberry (Berbers thunbergii), which is all over the trailside, is about to shade over these maroon beauties. Did it also protect them from the deer? This is one of the most common Trillium species found here in the east. It also…
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Naturalist Notes
Viola canadensis, a native violet.It was cool, so this Robin (Turdus migratorius) was hunkered down on those blue blue eggs.A Red Velvet Mite of the family Trombidiidae. Predators of the leaf-litter zone, as large as a blood-gorged tick and, being mite-y, rather looking like one.So many vocal White-Throated Sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) in the Ramble!And a…
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Blooming
Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica).Rue Anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides).Toothwort (Cardamine).Trillium.Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense), unrelated to ginger root (Zingiber).
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Obolaria virginica
A gentian family member not easy to spot down in the leaf litter of early spring. This was poking up less than two inches. We found this one, and others, in an unused, unpaved driveway in Virginia. Appropriately enough, since both its species epithet and common name, Virginia Pennywort, reference the state. (Virginia Pennyleaf is…
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Sprung
Tossing their pollen into the air… Scott Pruitt, the oil and gas industry operative given the hammer to destroy our environmental protections, claims that physics and chemistry are bunk. (Such a good lesson for students, but, then, the person put in charge of education doesn’t even know what education is; she thinks it’s a fundamentalist-infected…
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Hot February
Yesterday, in Green-Wood, some Cherries and a Red Maple were blooming already.Record-breaking temperatures raise the bar to the new normal. A nice review of climate change now. People, from the rotting orange head of the regime on down, can say it doesn’t exist; they can suppress research; intimidate scientists; but they can’t change the radical,…
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Tuliptree
Remember that Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) we got such close-up views of back in the spring?This is what it looks like now.These “cone-like aggregates of samaras” as Core and Ammons put it in Woody Plants in Winter, persevere. The hypocrisy would gag a snake, but the Republicans are beyond any shame (and certainly any claim to…
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January’s Flower
A cultivated Viola we found in a Green-Wood Cemetery planting recently. How can one despair when the earth continually cycles through its great changes? After winter comes the spring. In the dark, there are the stars. In the grey and the sere, there is a flower the color of the sun. Harper’s latest issue has…
Backyard and Beyond 