Ladybug - Macro Monday

I really enjoy "bugs" in the garden.  While I like taking pictures of flowers, insects and spiders are my favorite macro subjects.  So I was very happy to see my first ladybug of the spring.  I find it a little difficult sometimes to get good photos of small moving subjects, and I realized last summer that I was going through a phase where I was very focused on the technical aspects and consequently producing images that are nice but not particularly compelling.  To try to get out of this rut, late last summer I started trying to really consider color, both in the main subject and the background in insect macro shots.  This ladybug caught my eye when it landed briefly on a purple deadnettle (lawn weed) near sunset.  The reddish purple hue of the deadnettle makes an unusual and intriguing color combination with the ladybug's cheerful red, I think.

Today I'm playing along on Macro Monday, hosted by Lisa's Chaos.  Check it out to see some other cool bugs, and lots of other macro subjects.

Bloom Day March 2012

Here it is Bloom Day (thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens) and I've been so busy out in the garden, now that the weather has been nice and it's still daylight after work, that I've been lax about getting photos.  Right now, the most notable blooms in my garden might be the Pearl Bush (Exochorda racemosa).  Right now I'm looking at it in full bloom, but since it's the graceful buds that give it its name, I'll show pictures from two days ago:

I think this will be blooming for a few weeks at least.  I think this is a great, underused spring blooming shrub (or small tree in my garden).

Also finally in full bloom and putting on quite a show is the Carolina Jasmine.  Here's a shot showing the vine in all its glory.  It suits me, but I have to trim it back every time my 6'4" friend comes to visit.

And another photo showing some individual flowers.

Of course, it was the daffodils that really got spring going.  It started with the Ice Follies and Carltons (I think they're Carlton, anyway).

And then these unknown short daffodils that I can't identify that I already showed in a previous post.

And now there are various jonquil types blooming all at once.  I know that many of the all-yellow ones are Sweetness, but the ones with different colors on the cups and the perianths all came in a mix so I can only guess what their names are.  Sweetness blooms very early for me, but with a very long bloom period.  Frequently it blooms with multiple flowers per stem, and then later with a single flower per stem (presumably on smaller, younger daughter bulbs).

The hyacinths in the above photo are a nice surprise.  I had read that they will only last a few years in my climate, getting looser and sparser flower spikes each year.  I love the scent and am happy to have them as long as they last, and in fact the looser flower spikes appeal to me as much or more as the fuller ones since they seem less formal.  However, last year I dug these up to make room for a new patio and found that the bulbs had multiplied.  I spread them out and this year the flower spikes seem pretty full again.  Maybe they just tend to crowd themselves out.  The lower-growing purple in this picture and in the background of some of the other pictures is creeping speedwell "Georgia Blue."  I think the color looks good with the brassy daffodils, but it's a little faded already in this spot in full sun.  Another patch I have in part shade started blooming a little later but will last much longer.

Here are a few more bulbs for good measure:
Dutch iris.  The white ones are always the first to bloom in my garden.

Grape hyacinth.

And last but greatly appreciated, Ipheon.  These grow naturalized in people's lawns in some places around here, especially in Williamsburg.  I would love to have that but so far there seem to be exactly the same number of plants as what I originally planted three or four years ago.  They come in different shades and I really like this blue color.  I could buy more instead of waiting for them to multiply but I'm afraid I would not find the same blue color again.  I don't remember if it was a specific named cultivar. 

Other things that are blooming in my garden include the flowering quince, finally in full bloom after putting out a few flowers here and there since December.  My snowflakes are also blooming in much greater numbers now, and are doing a decent job of offsetting the color clash between the hot pink quince and red berries on a nearby nandina.  The hellebore is still in bloom and so is the periwinkle.

Chrysalis - Macro Monday

     I'm joining Lisa's Chaos for Macro Monday today.  Usually I take a new photo over the weekend to show for Macro Monday, but today I'm using one from the archives.  This is a shot of a butterfly chrysalis.  I believe it's a sulphur butterfly.  I spotted it during the summer in a wildflower meadow at the Norfolk Botanical Garden.  It's funny, but this meadow is one of my favorite spots at the botanical garden, rather than all the beautifully manicured gardens with their refined horticultural treasures (I like those, too, though). 

     I call this image "Promise."  I chose to show it because I'm all jazzed that it got selected for the Suffolk (Virginia) 28th Annual Juried Photography Exhibit which is being shown at the Suffolk Art Center between now and April 13.  This is my first photo to be in a show.  A friend of my husband's suggested we both put in some work for the show.  My husband also got a photo in and our friend got all three of his entries selected, so we had a great time Friday evening wandering around the gallery seeing each other's prints and all the other great images.
     Happy Macro Monday!

Vanquishing a Foe

     Heavenly bamboo.  It has it's good points.  I remember a long time ago walking around an elegant section of town and admiring the tall stems and bright red berries on clumps of Nandina domestica near the front door or steps of many of the houses.  I enjoy the lush clusters of berries, bronze in the fall and lipstick red in winter.  I like that they are evergreen and also often have red leaves in the winter. 

     They require no fertilizer or supplemental water.  It's nice, in a way, that you can cut them down to the ground and they will grow back again as full as ever.  They're great for something like hiding the utility cap on your cable TV access point.  If the cable guy needs it cut back, it'll recover quickly.

     But the biggest strength of Nandina is also one of its biggest drawbacks: it is very hard to kill.  You can have too much of a good thing.  I have basically a solid wall of Nandina six feet tall and 90 feet long that was planted by previous owners of my house.  

     It's partly my fault.  They were more spaced out and not this big when we moved in, but they spread slowly and steadily, and I have been all but helpless in the face of the behemoth until only a year or two ago.  I had tried pruning it, then hacking it, but it kept coming back.  I had tried digging it up, but could only make a dent on small isolated clumps.  "Making a dent" in fact, is what the Nandina did to my square-tipped spade when my husband tried to dig some up a few years ago.  The blade was bent badly enough it had to be replaced.

     Now I have developed a system.  I wish I had figured this out a long time ago, because the Heavenly bamboo hedge is going to take a lot of work to vanquish, but at least now I know how to attack it.

     Here are my weapons:

Step 1:  I cut off all the berries on the clump I'm going to work on.  This is going to be a violent battle and if I knock off a ton of berries, I'm just going to end up with clumps of seedlings.  I usually do find a small number of seedlings a few months after removing a clump anyway, from the years-worth of berries that have already dropped, but it makes me feel better to think I'm not sowing the seeds of my enemy.  I don't put these in the compost bin either; I throw them in the trash.  I don't know if this is overly cautious or not.

Step 2: I cut off the tops with long-handled loppers down to about a foot tall.  This is enough to remove most of the leaves and small branches, so I can see what I'm doing without getting leaves in my face, and enough is sticking out of the accumulated leaf mulch so I can see where the stumps are and not poke myself in the foot with them.  I pile the stems up either behind my compost pile or behind my shed.  The do a pretty good job of suppressing weeds in these spots while they break down.  The leaves fall off and mulch the ground after a while, and I sometimes retrieve a few stems later to use as plant stakes.  

Step 3: Now for the real heavy-duty work.  I rake up the mulch and dig up the Nandina by the roots a little bit at a time.  This is a bit of work, but not nearly as hard as trying to dig up a whole clump.  I have no desire to replant this stuff so I can go after bite-size pieces.  First I cut around a small section on the edge of a clump.  Generally, it's easy on the outside: I just use the spade to loosen the soil around the edge.  On the inside of the section, it takes a good tool to cut.  I don't do it with the spade, because I don't have that kind of back strength.  Instead I use either a mattock (if there's room to swing it) or the drop bar shown on the right edge of the group of tools.  The blade on this tool is relatively small and easy to get into a tight spot, but instead of using your foot and your body weight to cut, you are mainly using the weight of the tool.  It sometimes takes three or four blows to cut through a typical Nandina root, but it's not too hard on my back.  On the first pass, I don't worry about cutting every root, since I can't see what I'm doing anyway.  But I'm trying to loosen the clump enough to lift it with the spade (without damaging the spade or my back).  It turns out that Nandina roots are not very deep at all, just a few inches, so once I have things loosened up, I can slide the spade underneath and start lifting.  This makes it much easier to see where to make the next cuts.  Now it's a straightforward matter to cut the rest of the roots to remove the first segment, and start targeting the next segment.  Working around the edges of the clump, each segment is easier to get out as the roots are all being lifted and loosened.  

     Here are the roots of a patch I was able to remove in about 30 minutes of work.  

     The area I pulled them out of is covered in pine needles in the next photo.  Obviously I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm looking forward to planting something of my own choosing in this nice rich patch of soil.

Macro Monday: Moss

Take a glimpse into this tiny strange world on top of a brickbat.  Also check out what other tiny worlds people are photographing for Macro Monday, hosted by Lisa's Chaos.

In an out-of-the way spot on the north side of my house is a shady, damp place where I put plants I bought or divided while they wait to be planted in the ground.  There's also a handful of brickbats that I used to mark a spot where I occasionally stick cuttings so I don't lose track of them.  (Brickbats are just broken bricks.  If I had enough I might make a crazy-quilt brickbat path like some of the ones in the gardens in Colonial Williamsburg.) I guess it's very damp and shady indeed, because I found a happy healthy colony of mosses.

I know very little about moss and about all I do know I learned about five minutes ago in Brian Capon's Botany for Gardeners.  The little brown stalks are part of the moss's reproductive cycle.  Actually, it's weirder than that, because they are totally separate plants.  When you first notice moss in your garden, it may be just a soft green mat with no little brown stalks.  The green moss is a collection of both male and female plants.  These plants are unusual because they are haploid, meaning they have only one copy of chromosomes in the cells.  You may recall from high school biology that human body cells have pairs of chromosomes and so are diploid, but that human sperm and egg cells have only a single copy of each chromosome.  Those are haploid cells.  Mosses are a bit different.  The green part of the moss consists of plants that are entirely haploid.  These are the gametophytes, whose job is to produce gametes: sperm and eggs.  The sperm sit in "splash cups" on the males and are splashed onto neighboring females by raindrops.  Moss sperm cells actually "swim" to the eggs through water.  It's only when the sperm and egg get together that a diploid cell (the zygote) is formed.  This is the beginning of a new stage of the life cycle of the moss.  The zygote splits by cell division to form another plant, called the sporophyte.  The job of the sporophyte is to form spores.  In fact, it doesn't even photosynthesize so it draws food from the female gametophyte it's attached to, but it is a separate plant.  These sporophytes are the small brown stalks sticking up out of the green moss.  The spores form in the structure at the top and then disperse to start new colonies.   

Hellebores under the covers

I posted a photo of my garden's first Hellebore flower of the season a few weeks ago.  Now the plant is covered in blooms.  I like this plant more and more every year.  Now, I am finding out the flowers are really pretty interesting from an intellectual standpoint, too.

Ken Druse in his book Planthropology writes this about the hellebore:  "The female stigma of a hellebore flower is ready to accept pollen from another flower a week or more before its own male anthers have produced their fertile grains.  Even before the flower opens, bees push their way into the swollen buds in search of pollen, which they do not find, but deposit some from the last ripe anthers they visited."  This is described as a strategy to avoid self-pollination, to keep mixing up the gene pool as much as possible.  

The photo above shows several hellebore flower buds.  The top bud is tightly furled, and I doubt a bee would be able to force its way inside.  The middle bud is a bit looser.  The petals are still closed but not so tightly and there is empty space inside.  I guess this is the stage that Druse is talking about.  The lower flower was also just a bud, not an open flower, at a similar stage to the middle one, when I forced open the petals and peeled one back so I could take a look inside.  You can see the anthers clustered close together, with the five pistils sticking out the center.  If you look back at my earlier post, you'll see the anthers are much more spread out.  It seems to make sense that when they are producing pollen they would be more spread out.  I don't see anything noticeably different about the female parts. 

Avoiding self-fertilization is a good strategy, but hellebores are prolific self-seeders, and although this is  the only plant I have that has produced flowers, I found many seedlings of it this past summer.  Perhaps my neighbors have some hellebores close by, but I think it's much more likely that the plant does self-pollinate when necessary and this strategy is just a way to give pollen from another plant (or another flower on the same plant?) better chances.  The last photo shows the faded first flower of the season, the same as the one pictured on February 15.  Now all its anthers have fallen off, and the ovary at the base of the stigma appears to be beginning to swell.  Maybe I'll get more new plants again this summer!

Macro Monday: Field Pansy

This photo is my contribution to Macro Monday, hosted each week by Lisa at Lisa's Chaos. 

Earlier than any other violet in my yard, I see this absolutely teeny violet in bloom.  I first noticed it in a neighbor's lawn and was actually disappointed I couldn't find it in my own.  It's not like I don't have plenty of other lawn weeds, but I wanted a closer look and didn't want to be too conspicuous inspecting something on my neighbor's property on hands and knees (or, worse, pulling something out of their lawn.  That seems downright antisocial, even though I'm pretty sure they would consider it a weed and not a wildflower).  What I really wanted was a close look at the leaves so that I could identify the species, but it's not easy to differentiate the leaves of a single tiny plant growing in the middle of a weedy lawn.  But today I found it growing in my herb garden.  Previously, I bragged about how well weeded my herb garden is.... oh well.  I was happy to see it.  It was well-enough separated from the nearby parsley and chamomile that I could get a good enough view to look it up in my trusty Peterson's Wildflower Field Guide.  It looks like Viola kitaibelliana, the Field Pansy.  The next picture shows the shape of the leaves.  Note the long, narrow stipules at the base of the upper leafstalks.

Peterson's lists it as "Alien."  It seems to me that many of our lawn weeds are introduced species, rather than native wildflowers.  Years ago, when I first got this field guide and didn't know much, I would pull it out to try to identify every flower I could find growing in the wild.  If I was close to home (i.e. the suburbs), these were generally lawn weeds.  When you think about it, lawn is not really a native habitat here, in the region once blanketed by the Eastern Deciduous Forest.  Forest openings would have briefly been occupied by meadows, but not mowed lawns.  Maybe it's more surprising that some native plants (like the common blue violet) can adapt to living in a lawn.  Many or most of the other common lawn weeds and many meadow wildflowers are probably plants that have long been adapted to grazing by livestock and came over with the earliest Europeans.    

I snapped the last picture to show just how incredibly tiny the bloom is.  That's my index finger, grotesquely larger than life size.  The pansy is out of focus and overexposed because I'm not very good at using my camera one-handed, and it wasn't worth it to set up the tripod for a picture that was going to have my finger in it!  The tininess of the bloom made photographing it a challenge.  First, to get the camera close enough to get a nearly full-frame macro shot, I was close enough to shade the bloom with the camera!  So I had to take the photo from slightly off-center rather than line up with the pansy in the same plane as the camera sensor (as often recommended for macros because of the narrow depth-of-field).  That's OK, I like the slightly oblique view better.  I needed a tripod (I usually do for macros) but couldn't get it close enough. I was stymied for a moment, but just then my husband came out to see what I was up to.  I said "I need a bean bag!" And he said, "what about a bag of rice?"   Part of why I married him is that he's so smart!  Another big part is that he's really nice -- he actually went back inside to get it for me!).   Now the camera was all set up and ready to go, but sunlight on the foliage was making a distracting background.  The bean bag also gave me a free hand to shade the background.  Initially I meant to only shade the hotspot, but it was hard to aim my shadow.  I liked the look of the nearly black background anyway, so I went ahead and triggered the shot.