plants
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Birds, Flowers, Castle
Winding down with the reports from our trip to Sweden. Here’s Buskskvätta. Whinchat (Saxicola rubetra).These white flowers were everywhere.Anemone. It was a very good year for them, people said.My first ever cranes in the wild! Here’s Grus grus, the European Crane, known as Trana in Swedish. There was a pair nesting in the distance. One…
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The Mossy Bits
A primer on moss reproduction to go with this photo of a sporophyte.
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Barks
Beech and Sassafras running the gamut.A nice-sized Sassafras albidum. They run smaller in the city, where they’re often much newer plantings.And somewhere in the middle zone, Prunus avium, bird or sweet cherry.
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Skunk Cabbage
The holy grail of early spring.Symplocarpus foetidus, skunk cabbage, seen today in Great Swamp NWR. The only one we saw… but it’s subtle, and the place was ringing with the very distracting orgiastic songs of frogs. More on this curious little heat engine. April 1st or 2nd? Two years ago.
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Spring Purples
Look how purple these Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) start out!And flowers, ready to open. * Still, spring is having a hard time soothing us. A year+ into Trumpism: a sizable percentage of the American population is militantly ignorant, authoritarian-minded, anti-rational, resentful, racist to the bone, and eagerly yearning for the alleged renewal that fascism promises.…
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Tree Omnibus
The trees are singing. If only we would listen. Tolkien suggested it might be quite hard to hear them, since they sing on a whole different time scale. David George Haskell is listening with microphones and an acute biologist’s senses. The Songs of Trees was one of last year’s best naturalist books, beautifully written and…
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Acer Color
Is that spotting something amiss? (Well, not amiss if you’re a fungus.) * Trump’s corporate puppet on the FCC is trying to end net neutrality, a disaster for democracy. So it’s “break the internet” in protest in advance of Thursday’s vote. Once again, I’d rather join people in the streets, but until then…
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Botanisk Have
A selection from Copenhagen’s botanical garden. Their native plant section was mostly gone to seed, but a few flowers were still bravely waving. Yes, a little awkward cataloging this post under “Sweden” but the Danes held the part of Sweden we visited for centuries, so I’m sure, in the spirit of Scandinavian cooperation, everybody’s going…
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In Sweden
I particularly wanted to see some sloes, the marble-sized drupes of the blackthorn (Prunus spinosa). My walking stick, which saw me around Dartmoor, is made from the storied wood of this shrubby, hedgy, sometimes-tree. There’s much legend associated with this species; and (black) magic, like, for instance, how they find a long straight piece for…
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On the Button
The deciduous shrub known as Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) for its round flower heads is a fantastic pollinator-magnet. The plant loves its feet (roots) wet, and, as we discovered recently at the edge of Beaverdam Reservoir in Virginia, it also attracts hummingbirds. Who knew? Well, everybody in the pollination biz, but it was a lovely discovery…
Backyard and Beyond 