July 12, 2023

Missouri Botanical Garden – June 2023 (1)

July 12, 2023/ Gwen Morrison

So much to see at the Missouri Botanical Garden…

The Climatron is full of lush tropical plantings. Intimate landscapes of ferns and bromeliads…

Flowers (including orchids) and seeds tucked into the greenery….

Flowers and stems different than we see in temperature parts of the world.

Out in the summer sunshine…cone flowers and sunflowers thrive.

Daylilies are blooming profusely.

There was a very odd plant in Linnean House. I took several views of it…and should have taken a picture of the tag too!

I found myself interested in objects where the light was not overly bright or overhead.

And there were some places/plants that became immediately special: a large puffball under a bald cypress that was growing before the garden was started, button bush (one of my favorite native plants), and a woodland area with a gurgling stream (artificial but made to look natural, I enjoyed a short rest on a bench).

I appreciated the Stumpery garden….learning a bit about the history too.

And a few more plants I enjoyed photographing….before we went into the restaurant for lunch (and air conditioning) before we headed home.

March 10, 2021

Macro Landscapes

March 10, 2021/ Gwen Morrison

On my recent walks around the yard, I’ve been noticing the tiny landscapes on the ground….the greens of very early spring. The moss under our deck stays green all winter and now there are tiny plants (clovers and mock strawberry) coming up through it. They’ll stay low growing so we’ll never mow the area.

A patch of moss can also be found near our chaos garden. It appears to be more yellowish (maybe got too dry) with red seta…the sporophyte that was at the top of the seta is already gone (i.e. the spores long dispersed). The grass is beginning to grow around the moss and it will eventually be in the path of the lawn mower.

There are some weeds beginning to grow too…..coming up in the grass, tulips poplar seeds, and rolls of sycamore bark. The mowing will keep it short. I tend to leave weeds like this…hoping they have deeper roots than the turf grass…better at holding the soil on the slope.

The soil a few feet away from the chaos garden must be rich in humus since there seems to be a puff ball or two every year. This one is from last fall. I remember finding it when I was mowing the leaves! It has collapsed but somehow managed to stay relatively intact through the winter. Underground the mycelium is growing and decomposing the humus further with the help of microbes….the makings of healthy soil.

The daffodils are up in the oak leaves, old day lily leaves, and tulip poplar seeds in our front flower beds. Maybe I’ll cut a few of the flowers this season to bring their springtime indoors.

There are the usual ‘weeds’ in the same beds. I recognize the mock strawberry. There is a chance that some of the others could be black-eyed susans which I want for the bees and butterflies during the summer.

There are a few crocuses coming up. There are fewer every year. One came up last year out in the yard…the bulb probably moved there by a squirrel.

I looked closely at the joint between the driveway and our front walkway – lots of tulip poplar seeds there. They had made enough ‘soil’ for a small clover and some mock strawberry to grow. And there was a worm using the crack as a highway between the lawn and the flower bed; it was heading toward the flower bed….a much richer place for the worm!

Finally, I checked the bush at the corner of the garage. I’ve been nurturing a young holly to take over for the old bush. I discovered a plant growing in the stump of the old bush…a sure sign that it is rotting. I’ll be cutting it closer to the ground and let the holly take over completely.

Overall – these macro landscapes look more springlike than our trees at this point. I’ll wait a few more weeks to photograph the large scale spring landscape.

October 14, 2020

Mowing Leaves

October 14, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

It’s that time of year – our yard needs mowing more because the leaves need to be chopped up than the grass is high. Right now, the oak and sycamore are the ones dropping leaves. I wait for a day when the leaves are dry then make a pass around the places that have the most leaves. In the front of the house – I rake the leaves that are in the gutter up onto the grass before I start. I’m always pleased with the results. Our yard was in better shape this year because I did this same thing last fall – letting the soil benefit by keeping the leaf mulch from the trees growing in our yard.

The front flower bed is still green from the day lily leaves….and a few fading black eyed susans. I am not clearing it since the critters that need the cover for overwintering may already be in place.

While I was mowing the sycamore leaves, I ran over a puff ball! I didn’t see it until there was a big puff of brown dust. At first, I thought something was wrong with the mower! I must have come along whenthe puffball was primed to blow. The sycamore leaves are not quite as big this year as they get some years since late frost last spring killed a lot of the leaves that would have become the largest ones on the tree had they survived. Still – the leaves are substantial enough both in terms of size and thickness - that they make a the mower sound a little different when they are chopped. They tend to last too long on the grass if they aren’t mulched into small pieces.

I’ll probably have a few more leaf mowing rounds before the end of the season…probably one more for the oak and sycamore then the tulip poplar and red maple. By Thanksgiving – the yard will be in winter mode.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

A porch full of stuff. Pickups of donations have started again in our area. I had a porch full. My husband kept the cat away from the open front door while I put all the bags out before 8 AM. The donation staging corner of the living room is now available to accumulate another load!

September 07, 2020

Maple Seedling

September 07, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

2020 09 IMG_1743 (7).jpg — A maple seedling has been added to the row of Kombucha bottles on the windowsill in my office. I did this several years ago with a smaller seedling and it lasted for a long time – the leaves eventually turning red (long after the leaves fell from the red maple tree in our yard). This one will have a place with the cut flowers for the next few months.

2020 09 IMG_1743 (4).jpg — I pulled the seedling while I was working in the front flower bed. It must have missed my attention previously. My husband filled the bottle with water for me to put it in since my boots were muddy.

It was one of four red maple seedlings I found.

There were 5 tulip poplars!

I filled the wheelbarrow with bush trimmings and milkweed (without caterpillars) – once again using that as the metric for my morning round of yard work.

When I took the wheelbarrow back to the brush pile to empty, I noticed that the small puffball I had seen over a week ago was done with its development – had puffed its spores away.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Miniclover. My husband mowed at the lowest setting (i.e. scalped) the areas of our yard that tend to have problems keeping their turf…we raked over the areas…and planted miniclover. In the past we’ve tried over-seeding with grass seed and it hasn’t worked very well so we decided to try something different. Now we are watering every morning (if it didn’t rain overnight) for the next week or so….and we’ll see what happens.

August 25, 2020

Toad, Tiger Swallowtail and Puffballs

August 25, 2020/ Gwen Morrison

While my husband mowed the grass this past weekend – I took the compost bucket out to the pile and swept the deck (including the stairs down to ground level). The first surprise was at the compost pile: an American Toad. It blends in with the sticks around the bin.

It’s possible that the toad’s ‘house’ is a cavity under the compost bin since that is where it headed as I tried to get closer. It’s fun to think about the toad being under my daughter’s old turtle sandbox which is about 30 years old and has a great second act as a compost bin/ (maybe)toad home.

I found a tiger swallowtail carcass amongst the leaves on the deck as I was sweeping. It was missing some parts (like the abdomen), but I saved it for some later photography. I see these butterflies frequently in our yard. The tulip poplar tree is a food plant for their caterpillars, and we have a large one at the edge of the forest.

After I finished sweeping, I noticed a white object – about the side of a tennis ball in the grass my husband had just mowed. When I looked at I more closely I realized it was a puffball. There was a slash in the ‘ball’ and it was disconnected from the ground…damage from the lawnmower probably.

There was another tiny puffball nearby that was still attached to the ground and an older one that had been slashed earlier or may already released spores.

Back to the Tiger Swallowtail….

I took close-up picture then got out the jeweler’s loupe to look at the scales.

The wings were battered (missing pieces, some scales rubbed away) so this was not a newly emerged butterfly when it died. The scales that remain are still vibrant….tiny jewels even after death.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

**Two tiny leaves on the sweet potato.** The sweet potato sprout I planted in the front flowerbed now has two tiny leaves. It appears to be getting comfortable in its new place – set to grow rapidly. The trick will be to keep it moist enough during the hot days we have in the forecast for the rest of this week.

I was checking the plant when I went out to do another round in the yard using the ‘fill the wheelbarrow’ metric. It was a tough hour since my first task was sweeping the driveway. Acorns are hard to sweep into a pile because they roll! And the ones that have been run over by our cars are in pieces that don’t sweep up easily either; the little bit of curve they have seems to help them stick to the surface. I stopped before the wheelbarrow was full this morning…deciding that an hour was enough as the temperature climbed.

October 07, 2018

Mushrooms

October 07, 2018/ Gwen Morrison

Mushrooms are coming up all over. The moisture we got in September evidently provided optimal conditions for the fungi to put up fruiting bodies.

On the way home from Belmont last week, I stopped along the road to photograph an embankment with visible mushrooms.

As I got closer I discovered some that were not quite as visible. There were at least three different kinds. The largest ones, that were in all stages of development, were what I saw first. The started out as white then began to darken and crack like meringue. Finally, the cap splits. There were some that were still just pushing up – still almost concealed by pine needles.

There was one that was almost the same color as pine needles.

And puffballs that were in all stages of development.

When I got home, I noticed a large one at the base of a neighbor’s tree. I put my macro lens beside it to show the size and then took a picture of the surface with the lens; it looked like a topography map with rifts between the brown patches!