Blog

These are flower heads of dwarf horseweed, Conyza ramosissima. They're about 3/16 inch long. Do they ever fully open? This is as open as I've ever seen. I now have a couple in my garden, and I've been checking them. So far, this is as open as they've gotten. I have yet to remember to check at night. Stay tuned?

Here is the white flowered variety of largeflower jointweed. The white showy parts are sepals rather than petals.

There is a recent evolutionary trend for flowers to grow in pairs. It even turns up with flower heads containing multiple smaller flowers, as seen here with this New England aster. The only explanation is that pairs of flowers fit so well in the standard frame used in photography. In my photo album, you can see ample evidence of this phenomenon. This adaptation gives species a competitive advantage and helps them survive when others are cut. It also makes them more popular for cultivation.
While I sometimes chafe at the redundancy of the resulting images, it is very hard to resist. Please do not publish references to this discovery. I have not yet been able to get it published in a peer reviewed journal.

We just got my grand daughter a DNA kit that will tell her much about her family's place in the human race. It will be interesting to see how much the information will be open to interpretation.
One reason I say that is that through most of my interest in plants, Trillium has been part of the lily family. In the last couple of decades that has been changing. Partly because of genome analysis, the lily family has been split into numerous smaller families. One of those, in some interpretations, is Trilliaceae, which mostly places Trillium by itself. Of course even that depends on whether you split the genus. Other recent interpretations place Trillium in the family Melanthiaceae. That is the flypoison family, and that's a tough pill for me to swallow. Trilliums as flypoison? Not only does that sound unpleasant, but trilliums and flypoison are very different. I've been telling you all along that trilliums are in the trillium family, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Feel free to disagree. And it will be interesting to find out if grandma was told the truth about that Native American!
The trillium you see here is T. kamtschaticum, photographed at Longwood Gardens. It is native to northeastern Asia.

An image of this flower was previously posted here, and I called it Swink's St. John's-wort. This is an image from my more recent visit to that spot. It has wider leaves than most Kalm's St. John's-worts, but based on more careful measurements, I now tend to think it is Kalm's. I guess I allowed myself to be seduced by the fun of thinking I found something new and rare. Now I repent, will remove it from this site, and share my mea culpa with others that have those older images.