Winter is here in Maryland and I found myself choosing zoomed images from indoors for this month’s post: a bowl of seed caps at the Natural Holiday Sale earlier in the month,
The center of a poinsettia
And the sunlight on poinsettia petals – both in the Brookside Gardens conservatory,
The blooms and a young pod on a cocoa tree,
Water droplets on conservatory plants,
And two very sleepy cats.
I like the zoom on my new camera!
The poinsettias are the seasonal show at the Rawlings Conservatory this time of year….and they can be purchased too! They fill every nook and cranny of space in the entrance and the first room past….lining the permanent beds
And, this year, filling and surrounding a donkey cart.
There are pinks and reds and white and white/red combinations.
The one that looked most different to me this year was an off-white variety that has smaller flowers but lots of curly petals that almost covered the center.
I also looked for the green veined white leaves or petals – not sure which one they were.
I saved this ‘part’ to post about until last….since it was the most Christmasy….we’re getting closer every day.
Previous posts about the Rawlings Conservatory: Cactus Room, Tropical Room.
I posted about the cactus room at the Rawlings Conservatory last week. Today it about the experience of the tropics room. It a warm moist place – perfect for a change of environment on a cold blustery winter day.
It’s not only the temperature and humidity that is different from the outdoors. It’s the colors of the foliage. Everything outside has faded to winter drabness here – while the tropical room is full of color – dominated by green. There were only a few things in bloom and I focused on them for my photography.
My favorite memory of the room was not about the place itself but a mother with a young child (probably 6-12 months old) in a stroller. I commented that her child really seemed to be enjoying the green – wide eyed and alert. What followed was a very pleasant conversation about how different life is when not constrained by a career based schedule. She had stopped working when her child was born and did not plan to return for a couple of years…and I retired. We’re both enjoying this time of our lives and the choices we’ve made to fill our days. The little girl in the stroller seemed to enjoy listening to us talk too!
The tropical room was the part of the Rawlings Conservatory that reminded me the most of the Brookside Conservatory. It has similar plants (like the Bird-of-Paradise below). One difference: the water feature at the Rawlings Conservatory has a water feature that is deep enough that it is stocked with goldfish and there is a dispenser where you can purchase fish food.
The conservatories at Brookside Gardens held more than model trains when I went last week. I was drawn to the cactus and took some macro shots of spines – like the ones I took at Bosque del Apache.
The Castor-Bean Begonia (Begonia ricinifolia) and prompted me to research differences between spines and thorns. I checked the Wikipedia article on the topic. I discovered there are prickles and other semantics. Did you know that roses have prickles – not thorns? True thorns are modified branches or stems…so these red things on the Caster-Bean Magnolia are probably not thorns. But are they prickles? Maybe. The larger ones seem to be split into hair-like structures but the smaller one are barbs. I didn’t touch the plant to find out how sharp they were!
Every year there is a train exhibit in one of the conservatories during Brookside Gardens’ Garden of Lights. When we went to see the lights last week, I decided to come back during the day to photograph the trains because the light would be better. Last Friday was the day. It was a sunny day – which met my criteria for the light – but I was dismayed to find the entrance crammed with three school buses! I turned around to park in the Brookside Nature Center parking area. I was worried that it would be too crowded to enjoy the trains…but it worked out. There were a lot of children (early elementary…and some pre-school), but it was fun watching them try to find the superheroes and villains…monsters…Santa…magical creatures…Disney characters --- in add places along the train tracks. For some it was hard not to just watch the trains. One of the trains even had a smokestack!
I found myself taking more pictures of the scenes along the tracks rather than the trains. Enjoy the slide show – the best pictures I managed to get with the crowds of very excited children in the conservatory.
Earlier this week my husband and I enjoyed a walk around Brookside Gardens’ Garden of Lights. We’ve always liked this display because it is experienced on foot rather than driving through it in a car. We don’t go every year and were surprised at how brilliant the colors are with the LED lights; they are quite an improvement over the older technology. We arrived just as the display was opening at 5:30 PM. The sun had set more than a half hour earlier so it was already very dark. I enjoyed the ‘landscape’ of the garden in lights
And looking closer at the structure of some of the displays as well. Each flowers structure created takes many of the small lights – arranged to form the image.
Most of the displays are outdoors/nature themed although there are some fantasy elements too. Look at the slideshow below. Can you find a:
I always enjoy volunteering at The Howard County Conservancy’s Natural Holiday Sale in early December. This year was no exception.
I got to Mt. Pleasant about an hour before the event started at 10 and kept the refreshment table stocked with cookies, water, and Russian Tea until about 1 when the next shift came on. I enjoyed the food in the kitchen for volunteers and vendors too: scones in the morning and then a scrumptious lunch of white chili, salad, chips…and cookies for dessert.
It was a cool but sunny day and the turnout was the highest ever at just under 500 people. The vendor with wreaths and larger arrangements sold out by 1 when I left. The event continued until 3. The critter construction with natural materials and glue guns was going strong the whole time. I took some pictures of some of the materials and sample constructions before the event got started…and then got too busy to do more. Next year maybe I’ll make a critter myself. The activity started years ago for children but now it is popular with people of all ages (although still mostly children).
I’d planned to hike a little after my shift but it was cold and I was tired. I hiked past the farm house where a squirrel was active in the leaves
Because I wanted to see Ranger (the barred owl) in his new enclosure. He seemed calm even with all the activity of people constructing the goat house in the enclosure next to him.
On the way to my car, I couldn’t resist a picture of the flower pot people – in their December garb.
Now – I’m in the holiday mood!
November is my second month with my new camera (Canon PowerShot SX720 HS). My earlier posts this month have used a lot of zoomed images…but I’m sharing 7 in this post that are new. The first is an immature milkweed bug. See the stubs where the wings will be in a later instar? In October, I thought they would gone by November but the weather stayed reasonably warm and there were still green milkweed pods well into the month. Some of the bugs probably didn’t make it to maturity before the first frost.
November included the brightest fall color this year. I like the light shining through these maple leaves.
The Bald Cypress cones were more obvious against the rusty brown of the foliage being shed this time of year.
Ferns have sporangia on their underside; these reminded me of the dots on dominos.
Inside the conservatory at Brookside the banana plant had maturing fruit.
I’m not sure what this is…but it is growing (and blooming) in the Brookside Gardens conservatory.
I discovered Virginia Creeper growing on the brick in front of my house. It is turned red with the cooler temperatures.
On the day I went to photograph mums at Brookside Gardens, I also made my normal loop walk around the gardens. The first segment is the boardwalk between the conservatory parking lot and the Nature Center. The boardwalk was dusted with leaves. The ferns were still green but the thick undergrowth that blocked the view of the Cyprus knees further along had died and they were visible again as they will be until next spring when the skunk cabbage grows again.
I was there early enough that the sunlight cast a warm glow on the stones of the scent garden.
There were robins – looking a little scruffy – looking for food in the leaves.
I took pictures of single leaves on the ground all along the way and they are included in the slide show below. Can you identify the maple, several oaks, tulip poplar, redbud and gingko?
A gingko was dropping its leaves quickly and there were drifts of them along the path.
The Japanese tea house overlooks the pond – this time without geese or turtles around.
There were some surprise bulbs blooming - perhaps a fall crocus.
Many of the leaves had already fallen but there were some swaths of color.
Here’s a path that has an ‘icing’ of leaves (mostly maple) to top of mulch.
Some oaks have leaves that look very red in bright sunlight but brown on the ground. The light was bringing-out-the-red on this tree.
On the path – within sight of the conservatory again – a squirrel made enough noise in the leaves for me to notice and was still while eating an acorn….I took the picture.
The gingko near the conservatory seemed to have more leaves than the one I’d walk by earlier. Some were still tinged green.
In a pot – someone had stacked a small pumpkin on a larger white one…a little cairn like we saw a few weeks ago in State College.
There was some lantana blooming nearby and a skipper was enjoying a meal.
There is always something new to see at Brookside.
The conservatory at Brookside Gardens is filled with mums – the flower of fall. I always enjoy photographing the vivid colors and curves of the petals. I try to go early in November because I know they’ll be setting up the model train in the same conservatory later in the month.
The spider mums are some of my favorite. Sometimes the petals remind me of fiddleheads (of ferns) because they unfurl from a compressed spiral. I like the space between the petals as much as the density of the center.
Sometimes the colors are so bright they are almost blinding.
The shape of these petals is rolled at the center – an open flared at the tips. It could serve as a design for a vase or a neckline.
Some of the very large mums seem to have petals that will unfurl for a long time. One of the great things about mums is the length of time the flowers last – looking great the whole time.
I always think the curly petals on the outer edge are the most interesting.
The walk at Centennial Park was full of fall color a week ago when I took these pictures. I took a lot of pictures with the reflections of trees in the water. The leaves on many of the tallest trees like tulip poplar had already lost a lot of their leaves but the maples and sweet gums – the reds – were still plentiful and the beeches provides some yellow. The oaks still had some green. My favorite of these pictures is the one that include the rocks that are beside the boat launch; they break up the reflection with their smoothed surfaces.
Then zoomed in on some leaves – maple
And oak.
There were also seed pods along the shore of the lake that I recognized – goldenrod
And Queen Anne’s Lace.
Every time I go to the park there is something to photograph….this time is was ‘fall.’ (Last time it was ‘birds’.)
More than half my ‘little celebrations’ this month were place/activity specify. There were 3 celebrations of familiar places/activities:
Another 3 of new places/activities:
There were some serendipity sights that I celebrated via photography:
And mixed in with those celebrations was one ‘lazy day’ that I celebrated because it was so different from the rest of the month!
Last week, I volunteered for a local high school’s assessment of river near their school – the Middle Patuxent River at the end of Eden Brook Drive. The high schools start early in our county so the volunteers were asked to be on location to set up by 7 AM (the students to arrive at 7:30). It was still pretty dark when I left my house. My role was part of the abiotic assessment – looking at the corridor of the river. The old bridge abutment was a good place to look up and down the river for the assessment. The bridge had washed away in some flood event (hurricane) years ago and not been rebuilt. I had a table for the materials the students would need.
There was fall color to each side and lots of leaves that had already fall.
I zoomed in on the crumbling abutment on the opposite side of the river.
Some of the concrete was providing nooks for leaves. The brush that might have done the same function had been lifted far above the current water level in the last flood.
To the right was a table set up to support a group of students looking for macroinvertebrates.
There was another table to the left. There would be 6 groups of students in all; three would do the macroinvertebrate search and three would do abiotic assessments. The students would rotate so that they all got an opportunity to do all the activities.
We unloaded boots for students that would working in the river....and we were ready for the students. There as a few minutes of calm.
And then the flurry of 60ish students arriving….half of them putting on boots and going to the river. Data sheets being filled out. It was 2 hours full of activity as all 6 groups fo students rotated through my activity.
The weather was near perfect…the students were exuberant…it was great day for a stream assessment. It's a suburban river - with a lot of problems associated with impervious surfaces and extra 'stuff' from lawns and roads and lots of people getting into the water....but the county had made the banks into an undeveloped park; the situation could improve for the river. I want to go back to hike in the area before all the leaves are completely off the trees – a fall foliage hike close to home.
I found a set of pictures my daughter took the day we moved into our house in the fall of 1994 – and promptly scanned them. She was 5 years old and in kindergarten. She documented ordinary things – like the view of the partially unloaded moving van.
She also took pictures from the front porch of the house. The small tree with red leaves by the mailbox is an oak that is now almost too big for me to reach around (and it a major contributor to the leaves on our front lawn that I need to rake every fall).
Taking a slightly different view – the small tree near the front of the van was a maple that was never healthy. It eventually died and we replaced it with a red leafed plum. Across the street the ever greens are now very tall. Twenty-two years does make a difference in the tree size all through the neighborhood.
But my favorite picture is one that shows the perspective of a 5-year-old --- the washing machine coming into the house!
We made a fall foliage road trip last weekend from our home between Washington DC and Baltimore MD to State College Pennsylvania. We headed out on I 70 to western Maryland and then I99 to State College. Our first rest stop was in Maryland – the South Mountain Welcome Center with a rock façade (maybe from a local source?) and the morning sun showing off a little change in the leave color.
The next rest stop was the Pennsylvania Welcome Center (still on I70). That had big sunflowers in various stages of development. It was easy to see how the seeds look as they begin to mature.
Two of the flowers I photographed had bugs in them (I discovered when I looked at them on the big screen of my monitor. This one looks like and assassin bug
And then was is a milkweed bug.
Just after we left the welcome center – we started to see more color. It wasn’t the peak of fall foliage colors…but a beginning.
There was also fog hanging in the valleys…with a clear sky above.
The drive to State College was a good start to our fall road trip. I’ll post more about it tomorrow.
I have a ‘little at a time’ strategy for leaf raking this year rather than waiting for the majority to fall before doing some marathon raking sessions. Almost none of the leaves have even turned on the maple….the few red one stand out against a green backdrop.
But the oak has dropped about half and the purple leafed plum is shedding too. I raked the areas with the most leaves before my husband mowed late last week – letting the lawn mower chop up and distribute the few leaves that remained.
I measure my raking progress by the number of trashcan loads I take back to the brush and leaf pile in the forest. I compress the leaves to reduce the number of treks from the front yard (where the oak tree is) to the back. So far, I’ve done 5. The leaves from the trees in the back yard I’ll rake directly into the forest – no trashcan involved!
I’ve already posted about the serendipity and the catbird from my walk in Brookside Gardens last week. There were plenty of ‘normal’ scenes that I enjoyed too along with quite a few people walking the loop around the gardens. Here are some highlights:
The white wash is still on the conservatory. It’s there to help reduce the heat of summer inside but is washed off once it gets cool enough in the fall.
There are still flowers blooming.
And the seed pods of the magnolias have their bright red seeds (they always remind me of red M&Ms).
Some of the leaves are beginning to turn but most are still green.
I’ve been reading so much about the rusty patched bumble bees that I’ve started paying more attention to all bumble bees (this was is obviously not a rusty patched)!
Caster plants have maturing seeds. I always notice these at Brookside because one of my grandfathers always had a few plants in his garden.
The Tea House was empty as I walked by…the pond cloudy with sediment after recent rains.
Some of the ferns had spores on the underside of their fronds.
My last stop of the morning was in the conservatories. They were just setting up the mum displays --- and none were blooming enough to photograph – yet. I’ll go back in November. Along with a lot of gardeners working the garden, there were also people putting up lights already in preparation for the display beginning around Thanksgiving.
Last week when I was walking around Brookside Gardens, I heard a noisy bird in the bushes beside the path. It did not take me long to spot it among the branches of a bush with nice red fruit…and take a picture. It was grayish bird with a black head and tail….and a rush colored rump. And it was gorging on the red fruit.
I managed to get a few pictures that helped me identify the bird when I got home – a Gray Catbird – and it the red berries look like winterberries which are one of the most popular bushes planted around Brookside Gardens. We like them for their color in the fall and winter….the catbirds are evidently very fond of the fruit!
When I walk around Brookside Gardens – I savor the little serendipities of even a familiar place. This week I made an effort to photograph some of those surprises: a yellow petal that had landed on a very green leaf,
A turkey tail shelf function on an otherwise smooth stump,
Sunflowers in the children’s garden (I imagine this is a photo stop for many groups of children; I was too early for them although there was a mother reading a nature book to a young child at one of the tables in the children’s area),
A hat on a rock (there were a lot of volunteer sin the garden but nowhere near the hat),
A chipmunk that sat still long enough for a portrait,
A bald cypress knee in the plantings just outside the conservatory (the tree is on the other side of the sidewalk and there are no knees closer to the tree).
One of the reasons, I like natural areas – including gardens – is there is always something new….something not quite anticipated.
Our neighborhood has a troupe of resident blue jays that make their rounds – most days – through our backyard for the bird bath and swooping off to the maple and then the taller tulip poplars at the edge of the forest. Sometimes they stop to look through our gutters for bugs in the leaf debris. The picture below is one on our deck railing after he got his drink of water. That is the small part of the route that they are easy to see; some of the time I miss seeing them completely but I always hear them.
This time of year the numbers of blue jays are much higher because so many of them are migrating through Maryland to go further south for the winter. I’ve often wondered whether the resident ones ‘talk’ to the transient birds because it seems like we have more blue jays around than we have during the rest of the year.
While I was raking leaves on Wednesday (the first round of the chore for this year!), a flock of blue jays chattered (or is it more like arguing) in the trees above.
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
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