plants
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Blooming Now
Red maple. Wych elm. Apple. Cherry. Star magnolia. Ginkgo. Henbit deadnettle. (These are tiny, you’ll need to get down on your knees to see the detail.)
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Reach
Whoa! Make sure the five foot long branches of poison ivy coming off the vine twirled up this old pine don’t get ya! This is one of the best examples of the vine form of Toxicodendron radicans I’ve ever seen. It’s wild and wooly and has a hell of a wingspan. It would be easy…
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Viny Attachments
Red tendrils are hairy, so scary. Well, perhaps not as memorable as “leaves of three, leave it be” as a mnemonic for identifying poison ivy, but there you go. The climbing form of Toxicodendron radicans loves a good tree. *** The USDA’s animal-killing division, named Wildlife Services in a touch of the Orwellian, wants to…
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A Miscellany
Indian pipe in fruit. A spider wasp of some kind, found dead on this car. The pearly paint really shows up in detail; I bet its production is toxic as hell. The Pompilidae family of spider wasps has some 5000 species in it… There are a number of fungi that stain wood various colors. Denim…
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If you build it, they will come… sometimes
But not always. This wannabe Purple Martin colony waits patiently at the Narrows Botanical Garden. The half dozen bird-shapes are decoys It’s thought that the birds like to see that someone has done some recon. The so-called “scout” phenomenon of martins who arrive weeks in advance of others at a colony is, in explained by…
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Cottonwood Air
There was so much Eastern Cotton fluff, it was easy to scoop up a handful off the ground. A single mature Populus deltoides can produce an estimated 40 million seeds in a season. The seed is inside the dried fruit or achene attached to cotton-like filaments that help transport it through the air.Here’s my attempt…
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Buds
Liriodendron tulipifera. And something in the Theaceae family… *** As you know, the well of the federal judiciary is being poisoned by reactionary ideologues, shoveled in by Mitch McConnell’s corrupt control of the Senate as part of the culmination of the Federalist Society’s long effort to return control of the law to the corporations and…
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Time For Some Greens
A jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) wonderland. But shouldn’t they get darker, more stripey? Or does that come with age?The smell of the flowers of Liriodendron tulipifera incites reveries in my smell-brain. Where do I know that smell from? The ants, too, are intrigued. Wonder what they think when they fall out of the sky?While we’re on…
Backyard and Beyond 