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
posted by Entangled at 7:38 AM ::: Permalink
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Entangled,
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Entangled,
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Shimmery Flowers
I'm such a pushover for shimmery flowers. My oldest daylily, 'Medallion', is one that has a nice sparkle to it.
You can see the individual sparkles if you look closely. (Click through and zoom all the way in.)
But lately I've noticed a shimmer where I don't remember seeing one before - on petunias. Some of these 'Balcony' petunias have an interesting satiny sheen. I grew them from seed and planted out 20 or 30 seedlings. Not all the flowers have the shimmer - some are what I would call "ordinary" petunias and some are very velvety (like the burgundy one at the top center of the photo).
I despaired of getting a good photo of the flowers in place, so finally snipped a few stems and placed them in the sun where I could get the camera at the proper angle. A closer look at the petals here reveals a light reflection similar to the daylily, except more finely textured.
People get paid to study this stuff. I'm in the wrong career.
posted by Entangled at 6:13 PM ::: Permalink
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