Of course.
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High summer
Pink and gold
We found the most amazing poppies walking today.
The bug is not a bee or wasp, but a hoverfly (family Syrphidae); beyond that identification I won’t venture. They feed on nectar and pollen. And you can see the wee bits of pollen dust all over the petal behind it.
Pink…
The dianthus is blooming.
… and blue. This is some kind of ornamental (?) onion that pops up in the lavender bed every year. It’s very subtle but I really like it.
Odds and ends
A few photos from around the yard.
More crocuses
Crocuses are just endlessly fascinating.
Winter hydrangea
Still here, still beautiful.
Autumn hydrangea
It’s pissing rain right now, so I’ll pretend it’s nicer weather and post some pictures taken a week or so ago, of the hydrangea.
This is the same plant I posted pictures of here.
Even as the flowers turn over and fade it stays beautiful.
Evening hydrangea
A couple of years ago a friend gave us a hydrangea. This year it bloomed for the first time—and what a delight it has turned out to be!
The other irises
The owners who landscaped around our yard and around the pond, long before we bought the property, planted yellow flag irises. Sigh. Much of my yard work every summer is a long, futile, and very muddy attempt to fight this invasive species back. (One strategy I’ve seen described: cover the plants with a heavy tarp, weight it down, make sure it extends well beyond the area of the plants; leave the tarp in place for several YEARS and you MIGHT kill them.)
But elsewhere in the yard—in a dry spot—there’s another iris. I don’t know what it is, some sort of purple flag? I don’t think it’s a native variety, but it’s hard to know. Unlike most irises I’ve seen, it’s got very subtle colours—the purple and yellow together almost have a brownish tinge. The flowers are smaller and seem less floppy than many irises. It’s so self-effacing that the flowers always take me by surprise: omg, there are flowers here!
It’s not flashy, but it sure is elegant.
Zoom in (or out)
On our walk today I spotted one of the densest patches of twinflower that I’ve ever seen. We have some in our yard, but it’s nothing like this. (With luck maybe it will become so…)
They are really quite remarkably pretty at this time of year.
This patch was lollopping over a log, I think. It was so dense you couldn’t really tell.
Chocolate lilies
A few days ago a friend told me where she’d seen chocolate lilies (Fritillaria camschatcensis), so I went on an excursion with my camera. Continue reading “Chocolate lilies”
A changeable flower
I encountered this attractive little flower on an early morning walk. It’s very, very tiny; the flowers were probably about 3 to 4 mm across. What was unusual about it is that consistently, some flowers were yellow and some blue—on the same plant. That’s fairly unusual, so I looked it up.
It turns out that this is Myosotis discolor, the Changing forget-me-not (also may be called the blue-and-yellow forget me not, among other things). The flowers start yellow but change to blue as they get older. It’s listed as an Exotic in Canada; in other words, it was introduced, escaped, and has naturalized. But it’s not considered a pest.
Which is happy for the plant, and for us. It’s a pretty little thing.
The maybe-bergenia plant
…is blooming again.
Blue(ish) bells
More lavender bells, really.
