plants
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Everywhere
Some phragmites, and at least one, maybe two, other species have colonized this old whatever-it-is high above the D train at 9th Avenue, Sunset Park. Update: This structure is part of Bay Ready Mix Concrete.
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BBP Eye Candy
Take away a little green pigmentation and what do you get? You can open these up to fill your Monday morning computer screen by clicking on them, because you probably need a little boost to the start of your week. The last image would make a particularly good mini trifold screen, and since you’re using…
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Furman Cattails
The Furman Street rooftop cattail mini-garden is still going strong. Diagonal roof line necessitated by your blogger not wanting to venture too far out into Furman Street’s under-the-BQE dragstrip raceway.
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Brooklyn Bridge Park
The cattails (Typha angustifolia) are as high as an elephant’s eye. In fact, one of the gardeners was actively clearing some of these out, saying they were growing outwards and the goldenrod was growing inwards, and without care there would not be any pond after too long. Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), my favorite milkweed family…
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Back 40 Mugwort
The Rock of Repose holds back the line of advancing Common Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris). This sneaked in under the fence from the Mugwort/Knotweed jungle beyond, but you can find it everywhere in the city as it advances to cover the globe. I’ll say one thing for it: fresh (and uprooted) and dried out (in winter),…
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Leaves of Three
Prospect Park’s Poison Ivy, Toxicodendron radicans, has leafed out. This is only one version of this very variable plant, which can be a shrub, a trailing vine, or a climbing vine. Old vines snaking up trees are hairy beasts, often with horizontal twigs. All parts of the plant can cause severe inflammation, so remember the…
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A Mystery
This is brand new Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) leaf, pinky-nail-sized, still to unfold into its characteristic mitten-like shape. That was the extent of early spring growth on these giants of our forest one weeks ago, so when I noticed a patch of rich green way up on a branch of a mature specimen of this…
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Long Horns
Sometimes you don’t notice the details (or the scandalously narrow field of focus) of a macro shot until later. Check out these great big antenna, like something you’d find on long-horned cattle. This worker ant is busy on that understory delight Spicebush, Lindera benzoin.
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Skunk Cabbage, Take Two
So I just missed the blooming of the skunk cabbage this year. In fact, I’ve never seen it. The photo in my previous post was taken in the Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Tuesday; there were just a few post-bloom leaves there. The pictures in this post come from today on…
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Spring’s sprung
Spring officially started early this morning, but it’s been bursting out for more than a month now. These pictures are from last week in the Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Backyard and Beyond 