Category Archives: Flora
Pink Peony Progression
North side yard sports these peonies in progressive states of bloom.
Postured restful now having weathered recent rains, the eldest now nearly too heavy for itself.
Soon, a good dose of sun will raise and swell these blossoms before they, as peonies always do, finally abandon to gravity.
Mirrored Flora
Still morning, time of literal reflection,
considering self’s perception,
realizing world’s objects and reflections,
sometimes appear identical.
Lichen Fungus
Lichens… never alone.
The UK website www.theanswerbank.co.uk offers interesting answers to questions about lichens:
https://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Animals-and-Nature/article/are-lichen-animal-mineral-or-vegetable/
Birch
This birch, too close to neighbor hemlock, grows leaning, finds sun where it can. This wet pale October shows little more color than this birch scar.
Maple splashes yellow here and faraway there. Squalls alternate sun, blue and wet across the sky. Playful youngsters now, they’ll mature as real cold sets, getting running starts from west of Erie.
Almost snow today, cold to soon come. Any last colors will present, dry and fall as seasons deepen.
American Dagger Moth Caterpillar
This fellow made his way across the bluestone recently. I gave him a pretty wide berth – close enough to get a photograph, far enough that his spikey hairs didn’t touch me as they are somewhat poisonous and will cause irritation.
Wikipedia reports:
Acronicta americana, the American dagger moth, is a moth of the family Noctuidae. It was originally described by Thaddeus William Harris in 1841 and is native to North America.
Then, I noticed that nature had copied the pattern of his yellow starlike fur in green on the forest floor.
Dusk Buck
Oak Sentinel
At the right time of year, it’s almost impossible to not notice the abundance of acorns in places near the top of Elk Mountain.
On a walk several years ago, I gathered, and planted a few in the side yard.
Now, this tree and a few of it’s kin planted nearby, conspicuous seasonal sentinels, splash the last glimpses of color as autumn fades, nods toward winter.
Dragon tongue bean
Curiosity got the better of me earlier this summer, when I came across a small plastic envelope labelled “Pole beans” that had hid in a kitchen drawer for the better part of a decade.
Uncertain if they were still viable, on a whim, I planted them expecting flat green beans. I became pleasantly surprised as the seeds sprouted into dramatic Dragon tongue beans.
Dragon tongue bean is a flavorful, juicy bean whose seeds are encased in a buffed colorful pod with mottled burgundy patterns throughout the shell’s surface. The shelled beans are pale pistachio green in color, their size, petite, and their shape, ovate and slightly curved.
Dragon tongue bean can be harvested, picked and used for their pods as well as for their seeds like a green bean (snap bean) or allowed to mature into a shell bean for using their seeds only.
Climbing Nightshade
Solanum dulcamara, also known as climbing nightshade, bittersweet nightshade, blue bindweed, Amara Dulcis, felonwood, poisonberry, scarlet berry, snakeberry,… is a species of vine in the potato genus Solanum, family Solanaceae. It is native to Europe and Asia, and widely naturalised elsewhere, including North America, where it is an invasive problem weed.
Solanum dulcamara has been valued by herbalists since ancient Greek times. In the Middle Ages the plant was thought to be effective against witchcraft, and was sometimes hung around the neck of cattle to protect them from the “evil eye”.
John Gerard’s Herball (1597) states that “the juice is good for those that have fallen from high places, and have been thereby bruised or beaten, for it is thought to dissolve blood congealed or cluttered anywhere in the intrals and to heale the hurt places.”