Daily Flower Report

Spiderworts are looking lovely this time of year.  A nice, early-blooming prairie plant, spiderworts have long bloom times as a plant/species, but very short bloom times as an individual flower.  Within the clusters on the top of each plant, a few (or more, as you can see) flowers bloom at a time, each for only a short time, but in succession so that the flowers can be seen for over a month -- usually throughout all of June.  They are morning-bloomers, and close up at night, so an evening look can fool you into thinking they aren't blooming anymore, but in the morning they're back!

Foxglove beardtongue -- commonly named because of its resemblance in flower structure to the foxgloves that grow all over England, and because of the littly hairy things on the flower's corolla which look like a hairy tongue sticking out -- is flowering now:

Purple coneflowers are also starting to open.  The disc flowers will open from the outside in, and you can see that the very outer row currently has the pollen of open flowers.  We're just starting the season for this iconic prairie species!

Pretty in Pink

The pond is dressed in pink today... 

Last year, this slender false foxglove was a new plant for me -- it's great to see its delicate blooms again!  And swamp milkweed, a late-blooming Asclepias, is flowering!

For Dad

My father has spent a lot of time in England, and he loves the foxgloves that bloom in profusion there... fields of pink-purple and sometimes white, bell-shaped flowers, as tall as me sometimes.  So last year, I decided I'd try to grow some foxgloves in honor of my dad.  I got seeds, I planted them, nurtured them... they grew into lovely rosettes and then just stalled out.  I figured I had failed at foxgloves.  They didn't like the soil or the climate or something about my yard.  

It turns out foxgloves have a 2-year life-cycle.  This spring, my foxgloves have, with absolutely no input from me at all, grown up and flowered.  I now have a small patch of them in my yard.  Quite lovely.  I'll have to find out if they'll survive as cut flowers for my dad.  

In the world of native plants, the US native equivalent (if you will) -- foxglove beardtongue -- has started blooming:

I Love to Learn Something New!

It's not often, to be honest, that I run across a flower that I just don't know.  I mean, sometimes I have that "oh, I know that one but I can't remember the name," tip-of-the-tongue type of reaction, but I know that at some point I knew the name of that plant.  It's familiar to me, even if it's identity eludes me.  But today I came across the lovely little pinky-purple blooms pictured below and I had no idea what they were... a plant mystery!  (Happy day!)  A brief description: the photo may not communicate their diminutive size -- the plants are less than 2 feet tall, and the flowers themselves less than 1/2 inch.  They were almost hidden among the other prairie plants, though they were living in a spot with shorter neighbors... also, notably, about 2 feet from the pond edge.  The opposite leaves are slender and linear in shape.  Flowers (or their white little buds) come off right from the leaf axils on very thin stalks.  They are irregular in shape, with 5 spotted petals, very much like a foxglove, which makes sense because... my mystery plant is a Slender False Foxglove (Agalinis tenuifolia)!  YEA!  I learned something new!

We're Back

We're safely back from the UK with loads of pictures... so many that the task of choosing them and blogging them seems terribly daunting. I will get around to it soon, though!

Here, coreopsis and spiderwort are still blooming, and a few foxglove beardtongues, but the primroses seemed to have finished while we were gone. Bergamot is at "almost" and butterfly week and queen of the prairie are just about to get started, too... Puple coneflowers are also flowering.

Sun and Sand

It was, today, beautiful -- sunny, breezy, warm-not-hot. Rough blazing star is now in full bloom, making the sandy prairie areas at the beach just lovely.

Here, resting in a sheltered area among them, is a viceroy. You can tell the difference between the two both by the smaller size -- which is subjective but was what actually gave it away on this one -- and by the pattern on the lower wings. The viceroy has a black line that runs consistently across the middle of them (faint but present in this specimen); the monarch does not. The viceroy is well known for being a mimic of the monarch, capitalizing on the fact that monarchs, from munch-munch-munching on milkweed, taste nasty to predators. It's commonly used as an example in learning about adaptations... but it turns out, the viceroy is pretty bad-tasting itself. Its larval host plant is the willow, which is filled with a delicious chemical called acetylsalicylic acid... also found in aspirin, which is about how it tastes. Delish!

And speaking on milkweed munchers... here's another. The milkweed tossock moth, as an adult, is kind of a plain and boring grayish moth. But as a caterpillar, it is fuzzy and at least somewhat colorful. These two here were the second and third I've seen this week.

Here, a downy false foxglove... well, I think it's downy, but I didn't take pictures of the stem and leaves, so I'm going on memory and what little you can see back there... provides a lovely burst of yellow in the forest. These plants are parasitic on the roots of oak trees. Crazy... it doesn't look like most parasitic plants I can think of!

It was very wavy today!