Onions in the Chaos Garden

There are onions blooming around the base of the sycamore in the chaos garden. I cut the green parts as chives when I remember but there have been some that have gone to seed  for the past several years so I have more plants every season.

Now there are enough to get every stage of the flower heads in one photoshoot. They start out with a cluster of buds.

They do not all open at one time (there is a blurry coneflower adding color in the background for this flower head). At first it looks like the flowers are going to be overly crowed.

But then – some of the stems that support the individual flowers elongate.

There still seem to be a large number of buds when the flower head looks like a miniature bouquet.

The new buds hide underneath the flowers that have already opened.

And that is the state of the chaos garden onions in early September!

Queen Anne’s Lace in the Fall

Many of the Queen Anne’s Lace plants at Centennial Park are finished flowering and in the fruit cluster stage. I find the clusters as attractive as the flowers. There is still a lot of visual complexity. Some of the clusters are green.

Looking closer you can see the oval fruits beginning to form.

Later they will turn brown….and early harbinger of fall color.

This one has some fruits that are still green…others that are reddish brown.

Milkweed Seeds

One of the milkweeds in out chaos garden is already spilling seeds. One pod was fully open and the seeds were spilling out. There was a little breeze but I didn’t see any of the seeds float away – although they looked ready to go. I took pictures from several angles.  I liked the way the breeze was changing the light on the pod. The seeds look very dry and the white fluff that acts as a parachute to carry them on the breeze away from the parent plant glistens in the sunlight.

Another pod has split open but there was only one seed that had unfurled enough for the fluff to show. The others were still tightly packed in the pod. Next time I am working outside, I’ll take some of the seeds back to the edge of the forest where I’d like to have a stand of milkweed next spring. Once the plants are established they come back year after year.

Beautiful Food – August 2016

August is full of tomatoes and peppers – both very colorful foods.

My favorite way to eat tomatoes is in salads. Early in the month, the CSA share also included a sun jewel melon (to me the taste is between a cucumber and a melon…so I use them in salads) and scallions that went into the salad pictured below along with edamame for protein. I used a lemon vinaigrette dressing.  The lettuces are not at their best in August so most of my salads are full of colors other than green!

Of course I have so many tomatoes that I have to do other things with them besides eating them raw in salads. I am freezing the small ones whole, making salsa (some to freeze), and probably going to freeze some larger tomatoes – whole - with the top core cut out. Last year I discovered that freezing whole tomatoes in Ziplocs was the easiest for me and it was handy to take out the number of frozen tomatoes I wanted for soups or sauces.

As we moved further into August, the peppers started. I like the colorful snack peppers; they are perfect for salads because they are so easy to prepare – just cut the tops and bottoms off and chop the rest (seed and all)! I like the bell peppers too…the hot peppers not as much.

It’s easy to incorporate lots of veggies in my August meals!

Deck Garden Challenges – August 2016

This August has been very hot and dry – punctuated with downpours. The deck garden is dominated by green since the day lilies finished their bloom cycle in July. The hose says arced up the stairs and across the deck all the time because the downpours are not frequently enough.

I use the bird bath to decide when to water. Certainly when it starts to dry up the pots are dray too. So far – the bird bath water has not been around long enough for any mosquito larvae at all. There are always dead wasps floating in it.

The pleasures of the August deck garden are smaller than the day lilies – things like zinnias,

A cantaloupe vine (no fruit…but lots of flowers), and

A sweet potato vine (I’ve already harvested some of the leaves for a salad).

The butterflies and birds are noticing the zinnias and sunflowers….that’s another reason to keep the deck garden watered in August.

Zinnias

I can remember my grandmother planting zinnias in her vegetable garden – to give the mostly green vegetation some extra color. They work well for me in pots on my deck now. I enjoy photographing the flowers…and have picked some of my favorites from recent weeks. I’ve been experimenting with using the zoom on the camera rather than getting close. It makes a nicely blurred background (green from trees) and sometimes there is a surprise insect (an early instar of something that is almost clear on the underside of the rightmost petal). At the highest magnification - past what the lenses of the camera support and essentially cropping in the camera - the image has a painterly soft-focus.

Sometimes the background is black because of the way the light is – or isn’t.

I try to get above the flower so that inside shows.

The one with multiple rows of petals also has a spider web! All of the flowers that have petals attract butterflies. Tiger swallowtails are the most frequent visitors.

Once the petals begin to fall off, the seeds are beginning to form and that means that the goldfinches will visit more frequently.

I let them eat their fill. There are always enough left in the seed heads to crumble into the pots for another round of zinnias next summer.

Chaos Garden

The plot of ground in the back of our house that is not covered by the deck that is a story of the ground is my chaos garden. It is a haphazard production. The two hydrangea bushes that we planted almost 20 years ago two blooms on them this year after being almost killed by a late frost and heavy deer grazing last year. In early July they looked wonderful against the white brick of the exterior of the basement. A closer look showed the green tinges on the petals.

By early August – the flowers are fading. Many times they will dry on the bush. I bring then inside in the autumn for dried arrangements.

A close up of the leaves show deer are still around this year too.

The cone flowers come up every year on one side of the plot – and attract butterflies. On the day I was doing the photographs for this post last week there was a persistent spicebush swallowtail. There is some honeysuckle that photobombed a couple of pictures. I periodically pull all the honeysuckle to keep it from taking over.

There is a sycamore that came up in the corner of the plot furthest from the house and I have left it there to shade the big dining room and master bathroom from the sun in the afternoon. It has helped make the house easier to cool – but having a tree as large as the tree will be in another 10-15 years might be problematic. Sycamores have peeling bark…leaves that continue to get larger and larger throughout the growing season.

The garden also has two types of milkweed which I planted to help Monarch butterflies but that are enjoyed by lots of other insects as well. The common milkweed had all its mid-range leaves eaten by something. The lemon balm grows all around both milkweeds.

There are also several clumps of chives. I harvest just enough to use immediately. Somehow herbs that are cut fresh always taste better!

Black Eye Susans in the Morning

Yesterday I realized the days were getting shorter because it was really dark when I got up about 5:30. I was keen to do some morning photography by the time the sun came up and decided to try the patch of Black Eyed Susans in the front of the house. The first one I zoomed in on looked like its petals had been eaten by something. Are deer that adept?

I liked the curves and folding of the petals just beginning to expand from this bud.

The lemon light of morning makes the color of the flowers look like a deeper yellow than the mid-day light will show. The petals also do not all keep to the same plane from the central core of the flower.

The tips of the petals are not all rounded – and that gives the flowers more variety…and a sense of movement.

I couldn’t resist the curlicue of these petals!

Lotuses at Kenilworth Gardens

The lotuses at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens are in bloom in June and July each year. We’ve visited three times so far this year…and the lotuses were the most numerous and largest flowers of the place. They grow in shallow ponds and range in color from white to darker pink. The leaves are lived out of the water on stalks; the leaves are large and round with veins that radiate from the center.

The stalks that end in buds, flowers, or seed pods rise above the leave layer. The ponds contain many stages of lotus development during this season. Eventually – only the pods will remain.

I’ve organized some pictures to show the development toward seed pods….starting with buds and newly opened flowers. Dragon flies often alight on the tips of the buds – a good perch for them because of the small diameter and relative stability of the stalk in the breeze compared to the stalks with full flowers.

Then the flower is fully open and insects are frequent visitors. As long as the central portion is yellow – the flower has not yet been pollinated.

The flowers follow the sun. These are my favorite images of the flowers…when they glow with the sunlight through their petals.

Eventually the flower has been pollinated and the center part turns green and the rest of the flower begins to fall apart. This flower grew up into the lowest branches of a bald cypress.

The petals fall off and the seed pod is all that remains. The pods start to mature. They dry out as the seeds mature but none of them are at that stage yet this year. The petals last a little longer if they fall onto leaves rather than into the water but they decay very rapidly even on the leaves.

Most of the time the leaves are above the water forming shallow bowls that undulate in the breeze but there are exceptions. If they are on the water surface – they often have large beads of water that last much longer than dew on a summer day. They reminded me of glass pebbles used with flower arrangements or a form of abstract art.

Buttonbush – Pickerel Weed – Horse Nettle

There are other plants at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens besides water lilies and lotuses. Three that I noticed – and was pleased that I recognized – were buttonbush, pickerel weed, and horse nettle. The button bush grows at the edges of many of the ponds – often under a larger tree so that the bush is at least partially in the shade.

The flowers form round balls on the plant. They are green toward the center then white.

And the bees love them at certain stages of their bloom.

The pickerel week grows at the edge of ponds – in wetter ground that the button bush – and it likes full sun.

The arrow shaped leaves point upward.

The flowers start blooming at the bottom and move up to the tip of the stem….keeping the bees happy for the duration.

I spotted horse nettle near the ponds as well. This is a weed that is native…and very common to our area. It grows in our front flower bed (where I promptly pull it up) and in the meadow at the Howard County Conservancy. During the fall hikes the children always comment about this plant’s yellow fruits that look like tomatoes….and I tell them right away that they may look like tomatoes but they are definitely not tomatoes; the fruits are poisonous.

CSA Week 6

I am not getting further behind as far as clearing out the crispers – but I’m not catching up either. This week I still had carrots, a full head of cabbage, some broccoli, and a few beet leaves left from the week 5 medium share….and it was another 2 bag share for week 6.

Starting in the upper left corner: collard greens (one of my favors for rolling up and cutting in small pieces for slaw), fennel (new this week…and I haven’t decided what to do with it yet), onions (not cured so have to be used relatively quickly – they had been out on a trailer beside the barn and were warm from the sun….very alive), beets (the beets will become fruit beety that will go into the freezer and I’ll eat the leaves in salads, the stems in stir fry), hiding behind the beet is a small bunch of arugula ( from the overage table since adds flavor to any salad), cabbage, 3 pounds of summer squash (all the zucchini is going for zucchini bread – some of which will be frozen), 3 pounds of cucumbers (I tried to get small ones and will put one in every salad until they are going), lettuce (this will have to be eaten before the beet and collard greens) as well the carrot tops (I have so many carrots…some of them will have to go toward carrot cake).

Whew! That’s a lot of veggies.

Spent Lotus Flowers

We are making weekly jaunts to Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens since the later part of June. The lotuses and water lilies are in bloom during this time. It’s a good place for photography projects. One of my experiments the last time we went was to capture recently jettisoned flower parts on the big round leaves. I liked the colors – white, yellow, green…and occasional tinge of pink – and the curves. The first on I photographed still had water droplets left from the rain during the night.

The petals don’t last long once they fall. This one was a little past its prime but I liked the curves at the attachment end of the petals and the undulation of the leaf.

Sometimes they curve back onto themselves. The edges furthest from the attachment end of these petals have a tinge of pink…and the veins of the leaf under them seem to be radiating from the petal-as-sculpture.

Sometimes other parts of the flower spill onto the leaves while the larger petals slide down into the water below.

This leave held almost an entire flower with the petals turned in different ways. The pink edge shows on one of them. The veins of the leaf underneath don’t look as straight as when seen from the top.

I wondered how the flower parts came to be arranged. These seem neatly stacked!

I have a series of posts planned with images from the aquatic gardens...so stay tuned for lotuses, dragon flies, water lilies, and other things observed at this special place.

Day Lilies

The deer are very hard on the day lilies in our flower beds. Most of the time they eat the buds before they can open. This year I have implemented a strategy of sticking the small branches that self-prune from our oak among the day lilies so that the deer get a bite of sticks along with the buds. It has slowed them down a little….but not much. The yellow ones that blooms were very low in other foliage and almost under some bushes.

The only orange ones that survived looked like they were blooming inside the bush!

I cut some buds the deer skipped because of the sticks (eating all the others that did not have enough sticks) and put them in a vase to so some photography. I discovered just how fast the flowers open. The first picture was at 6:40 AM.

Two hours later they were about half open. And I took a lot more pictures of them (including the picture of the stalk in the vase. I liked the lighting outside – using the green of the trees as a backdrop.

By noon the flowers were open. They only last the day – hence the name of these flowers.

After last year’s fiasco when I had no flowers at all because of the deer, I dug up some of the bulbs to put in pots on the deck. I noted the times for the photographs. This first set was at 7 AM. Not there were was already a spent flower to the left of the one that is opening…and lots of enlarging buds.

By 11 AM the flower was open.

Two days later, many of the buds had opened and were already wilting.

Another pot had a different lily. The first picture was at 9 AM.

The second is at 8 PM the same day. The petals are already beginning to wilt…the pollen has been spent....but there are still buds to open on subsequent days.

I’m going to dig up more bulbs this season so that I can enjoy them on the next next summer.

Zooming – June 2016

My favorite topics for zooming are the usual: birds, plants, and insects! Click on each of the six images to see a larger version. It was hard to top at six collages because there were so many images to clip. After I went overboard early in the week with the Mesa Verde post – I decided that 6 was enough already. The first image includes a house finch, sweet bay, iris, strawberry and peony.

Next comes a monarch butterfly, a poppy, a mourning dove, the center of a flower, and a thistle.

Then allium ball, the back of a flower and another center, and hydrangea growing on a rock wall.

Then an all-insect collage: a dragonfly, a monarch caterpillar, a bumble bee, a black swallowtail caterpillar and two butterflies.

Next is an all plant collage: castor beans, datura, day lily, canna.

Finally – a moth, two pictures of southern magnolia flowers (l like the curves of the petals around the forming seed pods), and an Asian dogwood.

3 Free eBooks – June 2016

My pick for the ‘3 Free eBooks’ post for this month is a 4 volume set:

Pratt, Anne (revised by Edward Strep). The flowering plants, grasses, sedges, & ferns of Great Britain and their allies, the club mosses, horsetails, etc. London: Frederick Warne & Co. 1905. Available from the Internet Archive: volume 1, volume 2, volume 3, volume 4.

Note that these books were published (originally in the 1870s) by the same company that published Beatrix Potter’s books a generation later.

This 1905 was an edition published after Pratt’s death in 1893. I enjoyed the illustrations in all 4 volumes and am in the process of looking at other books on the Internet Archive by Anne Pratt. According to Wikipedia she was ‘one of the best known English botanical illustrators of the Victorian age.’ I’ve clipped a few examples to include in this post.

The Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College

Last week I walked around some of the Scott Arboretum while my sister did some genealogy research at the McCabe library. It was not an ideal day for photography because it was very windy. Fortunately, it was bright enough that the shutter speed froze some of the motion and I was able to get some flower pictures.

 

The arboretum is integrated with the college buildings and I like the quiet places with benches (lush vegetation spilling around them) and just having the structures as backdrops to some of the garden (in particular in the rose garden).

The vintage buildings appear to be well maintained…with exteriors much as they were when they were first built.

There was a cloister type courtyard with the bell tower and chapel.

When I first walked to it there was a person sitting in the shade reading – enjoying the space out of the wind.

There was climbing variety of hydrangea along the arches of the courtyard.

I definitely want to plan another trek to Scott Arboretum and explore it more thoroughly – without a time constraint and on a day when the wind is not a problem.

Zentangle® - May 2016

I’ve selected 31 Zentangles to include in this post since there are 31 days of May. Five that I chose were made on the back of old business cards – so did not display well with the square slide show of tiles. I liked them too much to pick others so I’m displaying them first. Some are plant like…

Others start out as webs….

Or loops.

I was inspired by art nouveau books I found on Internet Archive and Hathi Trust as well.

Those same themes show up in the tiles as well. The tiles also are some new colors this month. I was cleaning out boxes of brochures and old folders; instead of putting everything into recycling, I used some of the heavier paper to cut tiles: red, yellow, and rust. I also found some dusty poster board that had probably been on the shelf for 10 years that I cut up into 3.5 x 3.5 inch tiles!

Enjoy the May slideshow!

--

The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Mt. Pleasant in May 2016

I volunteered for several field trips in May at the Howard Country Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant Farm – but only managed to take pictures the morning I spent with some middles schoolers engaged in ‘service learning’ which translates to cutting or pulling invasive species. It was a cool, cloudy day like much of our May has been. The Honors Garden gate was open as I walked by – the fountain was on and the garden looked well-tended.

I noticed the old pump – now disconnected but still in its originally location.

The flower pot people were dressed in spring finery.

The wagon shed has a display explaining tree rings but I’ve also become quite familiar with the space since it is ‘cover’ when the day as become rainy – a frequent occurrence this field trip season.

And then this odd gall in a cedar. I did a quick search for it when a got home. It looks like a cedar apple rust gall.

By the time I took these few pictures it was time to get focused on the business for the morning – the wheelbarrows for each group were full of tools,

the left glove and right glove bins were positioned. I got the tutorial on recognizing the plants we were to remove. And then the buses arrived!

We worked for a couple of hours. Honey suckle and wine berry were the most dominate in the area my group was assigned. We cut and unwrapped honey suckle from a small tree – saving it from being strangled and suffocated by the vine. Everyone worked on cutting wine berry to the ground and trying not to grip it to tightly since the fine tips of the thorns sometimes penetrated the gloves. The pile of culled invasives was pretty high when we finished and the students went off to have their picnic lunch – a job well done.

Brookside Fiddleheads

The fiddleheads were another sign of spring at Brookside Gardens last week. I enjoy seeing how the fronds of different ferns start out so tightly packed and then unfurl in graceful curves.

Some start out very fuzzy looking. It is hard to image the frond from the fiddlehead form.

Some of the fiddleheads are further along and the expansion of the frond nearest to the stem happens rapidly enough to make it look like the tip of the frond is a knot…but is simply has not expanded quite yet.

Sometimes I imagine other things that look a little like fiddleheads  - like intricate round earrings heavy enough to weight their wire

Or the tentacles of an octopus.

I generally thing about fiddleheads being near circular but there are exceptions – the oval shape shows up almost as often.

Fiddleheads are another sign of spring – the harbingers of the lush ferns of summer.

Brookside Azaleas

The azaleas were glorious at Brookside Gardens last week. The day was cloudy – the best we could do with the weather pattern that seems dominated by rainy days recently. I got 3 selective focus shots that I liked - successfully tricking the automatic focus algorithm of my point and shot Canon Powershot SX710 HS to create the image I wanted. There were dark pink with the same color blurred in the foreground and side,

Light pink with some purple azaleas making the blur in the foreground,

And yellow azaleas with yellow blur in the foreground bottom and sides.

I also tried pictures of azaleas with other plants – like these flowers that had fallen onto a bed of ferns

And some that were blooming next to a pine.

While I was photographing the azaleas near the pine – I noticed a relative of the azaleas that also blooms this time of year – a rhododendron.

Even though the clouds were pretty thick – it was bright enough to see the reflection of azaleas in the pond.

Everywhere we walked was full of azalea color. If it has been drier – the benches would have been used! Walking around it was still a celebration of springtime in Maryland.