Tagged With: Seeds

Grass Tassel

Grass Tassel

Grass Tassel

You know how when field grass goes to seed it has little, soft tassels at the top? And if you pick one off and put it in your shirt pocket it will crawl out? That’s what this is. Close up.

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Dandelion Seed Head

Dandelion Seed Head

Dandelion Seed Head

I took a bunch more insect pictures today but Dorothy and Simone wanted me to post this picture of a dandelion seed head. For anyone interested, there are four new insect pictures in Extras.

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Columbine Seedpod

Columbine Seedpod

Columbine Seedpod

After the flowers are done, columbine gets these crown-shaped seed pods.

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Grass Seeds

Grass Seed

Grass Seed

Generally we don’t let our grass get quite this tall. This isn’t in the lawn, though, it’s growing in the midst of the black-eyed Susans and Verbena bonariensis in the back garden. There are a few places where grass gets itself and it’s hard to keep up with. This is one of them, not least because mowing right up against the garden is made more difficult by the flowering plants leaning out into the lawn. We don’t want to cut any more of them than is absolutely necessary. But maybe we’ve let it go a little too much. Anyway, I actually think this is quite beautiful, with the afternoon sun shining on the awns (the ‘hairs’ extending from each floret).

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Buddleia

Buddleia

Buddleia

The buddleia blooms are long gone and with them the butterflies and bees. It’s been cold enough that the insects that live through the winter as adults have all gone to ground and those that don’t are returning to dust. The colors of summer are gone and the colors of fall have faded into brown and grey. But the buddleia bushes still have some interesting features. Where the flower clusters were there are now mostly empty seed capsules. I think they are pretty, especially close up.

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Acorns

Acorns

Acorns

As mentioned, we went to a wedding reception yesterday for Dorothy’s friend, Kendra. Dorothy flew down on Friday evening and then today we drove her back up to Massachusetts and will be with her for the week. I say “with her” but we’ll be staying in an airbnb in Gloucester, about 25 minutes from the home she’s living in for the summer. After we arrived and got our things into the cottage, we went to see the garden Dorothy’s been growing this summer. While Cathy and Dorothy watered and did a little weeding, I relaxed in the shade and then took a few pictures. It was a long day (about 10 hours on the road) and I needed a break. The garden is in the yard of the aunt and uncle of one of Dorothy’s friends and there is a box full of acorns in the yard. That’s the subject for today’s picture.

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Purple Coneflower

Purple Coneflower Seeds

Purple Coneflower Seeds

The purple coneflowers (Echinacea purporea) is long since finished blooming. In fact, most things have. There are still flowers on a few plants but they are getting fewer and farther between. But that’s not the end of interest in the garden. In the fall we start to see shapes that we don’t notice in the summer amid all the color. The seeds of this coneflower are lovely in their own way, especially the way they detach and leave this little floret of spikes as they are carried off, probably by gold finches and other small birds. The gold finches, too, have lost their summer finery and are dressed in pale brown for the winter.

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Black-eyed Susan

Black-eyed Susan

Black-eyed Susan

It was a pretty normal, overcast, somewhat dreary, winter’s day today. No rain or snow but cool and damp. The ground is completely saturated and there is some leftover snow scattered around. It’s warmer than it’s been and forecast to be in the 60s this week. This is the remains of a black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia species). We leave them through the winter for the birds, although most of them don’t get eaten by the spring. Sometimes we’ll see goldfinches (Spinus tristis) or dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis up in them, but food is never really scarce around here.

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Maple Samaras

Maple Samaras

Maple Samaras

It’s that time of the year when the maple trees let loose thousands upon thousands of “helicopters” (a.k.a. samaras). They’ll be thick on the lawn and patio and front walk. Not as thick as they once were, because we have fewer maple trees than we did, but still quite a lot. Then they will start growing. In the lawn, the first time the grass is cut, they’ll be taken care of. In the garden beds they need to be pulled up.

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Rudbeckia Seeds

Rudbeckia Seeds

Rudbeckia Seeds

I took photos of various seeds in the yard this afternoon. First I took pictures of seeds of the Euonymus japonicus. From there I moved on to these Rudbeckia seed heads. I think their form and subtle brown colors. I took photos of blackberry lily Iris domestica fruit, which do have a pretty blackberry-like appearance. I also took a few photos of the tops of Monarda and of the feathery seeds of the Clematis terniflora. None of the photos were wonderful but this one is my favorite. I also took a photo of a robin in the holly tree by the driveway.

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Photo 175,000 — Maple Samaras

Maple Samaras

Photo 175,000 — Maple Samaras

Cathy and I went for a walk in the neighborhood after work this evening. I had hoped to have a photo of a pile of rocks dressed up as a nurse. There is a house a few blocks from us with a stack of rocks, between 4½ and 5 feet tall. Occasionally they “dress” them in something for the occasion, such as with a Santa suit at Christmas. Yesterday, Cathy saw them in a nurses outfit, presumably in honor of health care workers during the covidian interval. Unfortunately, they were back to their bare selves this evening. So, instead, I give you photo number 175,000 from my camera, some maple samaaras, or winged seed capsules on a tree down the street from us.

Technically, this is only photo number 174,983 because the photos are numbered from 1 through 9,999 and then it starts over at 1, meaning there is no photo numbered 10,000, 20,000, etc., so the 175,000th photo will have been taken tomorrow (but I probably won’t post that one).

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Winter

Black-eyed Susan Seeds

Black-eyed Susan Seeds

As we pass through the darkest days of the year, it’s good to remember the brighter times that are coming. In the summer, the yard was filled with colors, green, yellow, pink, red, and purple. In the winter most things are brown or grey. But the cycle repeats. The brown seeds grown into green plants that bloom in all the colors of the rainbow. But even the browns can be pretty. I wondered around the yard this afternoon and took a handful of photos, including this of black-eyed Susan seed heads. In a surprisingly short time, the yard will be in bloom again.

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