Slow and Steady...

Turtles are laying eggs!

Here are things in full bloom in the prairie today:

Golden Alexander and spiderwort color the prairie with yellow and purple...

Cream Indigo

Wild Rose

Canada Anenome

Columbine

Prairie Alumroot

Phlox

Jumping In...

Having stopped writing for so long, it's hard to start again. I feel like I have to have something spectacular to say, something more than just that the columbines are in full bloom, and the lilies of the valley. The prairie alumroot. The phlox. The golden Alexander, Jacob's ladder. Shooting star and may apples. Although this is what I need to write, I suppose... Right now, there is plenty to report, though we are sort of in the lull between spring flowers and summer ones. Plenty happens in that lull, though, it's still spring, after all.

In the past four weeks, I started and finished the spring camping trips that I take with students. I traveled to Devil's Lake in Wisconsin and then to Warren Dunes, MI, for two rainy and chilly weeks in a row. (Both were beautiful...) Our front yard has been transformed from turf grass into a native garden and all the vegetables and herbs are in the ground. And finally, on Memorial Day, it got hot. Sweat-while-you're-doing-nothing hot... this, following a 48 degree high on May 26, which tied the record for coldest May 26 here ever! Spring in the Midwest...

School winds down this week for the summer, but we're busy busy all through the month of June. I shall try to be better about keeping data and blogging...

Some Actual Phenology

Sweet grass, a very early-flowering prairie grass, has flowers-turning-to-seeds. This short grass is rather aggressive (I may have made a different planting choice years ago, if I'd known how aggressive it was). It has crept into the lawn and now when I mow, the vanilla aroma for which it is named fills the air.
Honeysuckle blooms. These shrubs are the current bane of my gardening existence. If they were in my yard, they'd be removed, but alas, the neighbors don't have the same taste in plants as we.
Prairie alumroot. As far as I can tell, this is pretty much what they look like in flower. Not the showiest native plant...
Red baneberry blooms. I quite love this plant -- although more for its eponymous berries than these flowers -- so I am glad to see this one back... but also a little sad because I had two, and only one came back this year.

Also noted: Lewis' prairie flax bloomed mid-week at school, but in my yard the buds are still tightly closed.