Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Flowery Interlude
Are you tired of reading about vegetables here? How about flowers and butterflies for a change?
The meadow below the vegetable garden has turned gold with these exuberant Tickseeds (Bidens sp.). What you can't see from that photo is the huge number of tiny skippers flitting about them.
The flowers have an attractive honey-sweet fragrance too, but you'll just have to trust me or find some and do your own sniff test.
One of my favorite fall wildflowers is Ironweed (Vernonia sp.). I don't have many of these and I wish I did. It takes a lot of them to make an impression.
The one above is past its prime, but the flowers are pretty close up. The photo below shows the individual fringe-y florets, but if you want a good look, click through and magnify the image (button will be above the photo, right corner).
Near the Ironweed, you can clearly see the path the deer made through the meadow between the woods and the vegetable garden. But I'm not going to talk about vegetables today.
My mystery wildflower continues to bloom. I've looked through several wildflower books and websites and I'm still stumped. It's about 8 inches tall with thin opposite leaves. There were 3 plants scattered in various places at the edge of the woods, but 2 of them vanished during the August drought. The survivor was the largest of the 3. I don't remember seeing this flower last summer.
This Cloudless Sulphur butterfly is a big one, much larger than the more common Clouded Sulphur. I've seen them a few times this summer and always on these pale orchid-purple petunias, where their color is complemented perfectly. According to Butterflies through Binoculars, they have the unusual habit of migrating north in the autumn.
And just like caterpillars into butterflies, pepper flowers turn into fruit! More later about my cooking experiments with Ají Dulce and associates.
Labels: butterflies, critters, peppers, petunias, wildflowers
7 Comments:
Wow, those are some pretty impressive peppers! Yum! I'm still waiting for mine to ripen. Yes, don't you wish we could have "scratch n sniff" on our blogs? :) The flowers are beautiful!
Nancy: I'm having a great time with the peppers this season. I think scratch-n-sniff technology is a long way off, alas. I love the indescribable scent of an autumn meadow, and the tickseed flowers must be part of the mix.
That's what all those gorgeous yellow flowers are now everywhere! They look great, especially combined with some purple.
I think weed is so pretty. It is native here in Ohio and it looks so great out in the fields.
Come visit with us at Blotanical!
http://www.blotanical.com/
Bek: It seems that many wildflowers are stingy with their flowers, but the tickseed is just completely covered in flowers. I think it would be worth growing as a garden plant.
Lona: I'm all in favor of pretty weeds! I haven't been to Blotanical for a while - I'll head over there right now.
Ironweed is one of my favorites, I would love to have it here but it is way too big for my suburban space. The mystery wildflower looks like a member of the phlox family, well, that's my best guess! Good luck,
Gail
Gail: Ironweed is definitely a big plant. I wonder if it would flower if it was pinched or cut back in early summer? I may experiment on a couple of them next year (or just let the deer do it for me). I'll try taking a closer look at the Phlox section of the wildflower books. I'm still stumped.
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