Saturday, June 7, 2014

New flowers!

On days when both Marc and I are working at Miner's Castle, we take turns staffing the visitor center and roving - walking around between the overlooks, talking to visitors, etc. I've also started carrying my camera in my pocket, because I am planning to put up some flower photos in the visitor center to identify what is currently blooming out there. You never know what you might see!

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More Canada violet. The curled-up one shows the purple underneath nicely!


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Chokecherry bushes! I've been seeing a LOT of these.

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It was cloudy out - pretty dark, in fact - so the colors of the cliffs and the water showed up a bit differently.

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Some very low cloud cover over Grand Island...

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This is False Solomon's Seal.

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They are all over the place. Kind of ironic that there doesn't seem to be any true Solomon's Seal around!

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The view through the woods has gotten very green now!

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It's not the clearest photo, but I was surprised to find some white forget-me-nots among the blue! Also, it's very hard to get my camera to recognize that shade of blue - it usually comes out as white, so this was a good opportunity to show the actual color! These flowers are invasive, having escaped from gardens, and reseed very effectively so they are pervasive through a lot of the woods here. But they sure are a lovely shade of blue.

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New flowers! Lots of them, growing all over the area down by the lower overlook. These are Bluebead Lilies, which will be making dark blue berries eventually. Although now I kind of wish there was a flower called Bluebeard Lily...

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There were also quite a few of these Starflowers, dotted here and there among the Bluebead Lilies.

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Some funny little red bumps on these sugar maple leaves - probably some kind of gall, where insects have laid eggs on the leaf along with some kind of chemical that causes the leaf to grow a little shell around the egg to protect it. You see big round ones too, but a lot are just teeny little bumps like this.

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Yep, still foggy over at Grand Island!

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More Bluebead and Starflowers.

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I haven't had a chance to look this one up yet - it's harder with shrubs, because many flower books only do small plants, not flowering trees or bushes. But I like the little puffballs on the stamens - it looks like a bunch of tiny cartoon aliens or something!

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Also, it's got a cute little spider on it!

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This one is baneberry. Is that not an awesome name? Here's a close-up:

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More puffballs, but different!

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