Ten Little Celebrations – September 2024

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It seemed liked the heat of summer lingered into September this year…but we are already savoring a few cooler days and looking forward to fall foliage. There was plenty to celebrate this month:

Places to visit

Butterflies at Botanical Garden of the Ozarks (in Fayetteville). Celebrated finally seeing some of the larger butterflies although it was in Arkansas rather than at home.

A few hours at the Lovett Pinetum. The place is not a park…requires some coordination to visit. I visited as part of my Identifying Woody Plants class (Missouri State University) and celebrated the evergreens…but also the native plants that are growing in the unmanaged areas. There is also a lovely spring feed pond and then stream.

Japanese festival at the Springfield Botanical Gardens. Celebrating big drums and the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden full of people enjoying the fall day. We got ice matcha tea just before the booth was scheduled to close!

La Petite Prairie field trip. Celebrating the experience of walking through a prairie with grass almost as tall as me for the first time….and not getting bitten by anything (maybe because of my permethrin treated gaiters and hat…long sleeves and jeans).

Family ties

Finding puzzles for Dad. Finally…found a used books/puzzles sale that had some 300 piece puzzles. Celebrated and took them down to Dallas for my dad a few days later.

Around our yard

A cooler day. September had some hot days…but there are cooler ones where the high stays in the 70s to celebrate too.

Getting the yard mowed and the brush burning in the chiminea. I celebrated that I got so much yard work done on one of the cooler days…mowed the whole yard and burned a pile of brush that had accumulated during the summer.

Collecting pin oak acorns to sprout. Celebrating finding a video about sprouting acrons in water and starting the process with some carefully selected acorns from my neighbor’s tree that fell in my yard.

Planting pawpaw seeds. So many seeds from 2 pawpaws I got from an earlier master naturalist class! This time I stratified them before planting. I am celebrating that I got them in the ground…and hopefully will celebrate some of them coming up next spring/summer.

American Spikenard seeds turning red. Celebrating that the American Spikenard I planted a year ago has survived and is producing red seeds this September.

Botanical Garden of the Ozarks

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If I lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks would be one of my favorite places. Our membership at the Springfield Botanical Gardens got us in as reciprocal members.

Even before we went into the gardens, I saw several swallowtails on the plantings at the edge of the parking lot.

There was also a water feature near the entrance with water lilies.

I spotted a grasshopper that stayed still long enough for a portrait.

We heard the garden’s rooster crowing as we walked into the first garden area - a vegetable garden with a corn shaped fountain and red okra. I had never seen any okra that color previously. It is evidently edible like regular okra but also a colorful plant for the garden. The gardener that was working that morning told me it was her backup plant for things that did not fare as well in the high heat over this summer…and it looked great.

There was a children’s garden with one adult sized entrance and several child size ones with tile mosaic arches.

Just outside the children’s garden here was a train of couches for reading.

And then we came to the screened in butterfly house! Lots of opportunities for butterfly photography!

Continuing through the garden…I noticed some structures. My favorite was a pair of porch swings that were mostly in the shade; we sat for a bit, enjoying the swing, appreciating the little break before we made our way back to the entrance of the garden.