#Blue Mistflower

[uxbridge]

Mistflower and late bonset

[hyssopandbee]

[vandaliatraveler]

A selection of late summer wildflowers growing in the riparian zone along the Monongahela River at the Friendship Hill National Historic Site.

From top: Paleleaf woodland sunflower (Helianthus strumosus), also known as pale-leaved sunflower, distinguished by long leaf petioles and a pale leaf underside; common sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), a water-loving aster whose dried leaves were once used to make snuff; cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), whose scarlet, five-lobed flowers draw hummingbirds as pollinators; the closely-related great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica), which early settlers once used as a treatment for syphilis (wishful thinking); and blue mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum), or wild ageratum, a native aster that has become popular as a garden plant.

As a note, about a dozen sunflowers call NC-WV - SW PA home and they readily hybridize, often complicating identification. Pale-leaved sunflower has a tall, branching structure up to 7 feet in height and dense clusters of large flowers. In addition to long petioles and a pale leaf underside, this sunflower has a smooth stem with a whitish bloom to it. It's a very beautiful mid-to-late summer aster and one of my favorite wildflowers of Central Appalachia.

[strayfriend]

It's good to be home! Sightings from the garden yesterday.

[faguscarolinensis]

Conoclinium coelestinum / Blue Mistflower at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University in Durham, NC

[rabccphotography]

Blue mistflower

[secretly-a-trickster-goddess]

Another nature stroll! (Well, actually drive since my ankle is sprained. 🤷🏻‍♀️)

[inthecityofgoodabode]

September 2024: Gardening, Fishing & Other Distractions

Monday harvest:

My queen was watching YouTube videos from Georgia & Azberbaijan and got inspired:

Wednesday harvest:

Perhaps the most bougie sign warning about water moccasins:

We got lost for a bit while pond crawling but found longhorns:

Beaver at a promising suburban lake:

Friday's meager catch in spite of the rain- 2 small Crappie, 1 Bream & 2 Green sunfish:

Even when the fishing is light, we come home with catches like - cardinal flowers:

And Blue Mistflower:

Osprey on the hunt:

Saturday catch:

My queen bought some cool season seedlings from GrowJoy. This company is the best we've encountered in terms of quality of plants & care in shipping:

My queen got some new snake boots & has been happy with the comfort over the last few days compared to her old boots:

[florenrune]

Plant Appreciation Post! (These lovelies were all photographed in Ohio by me on Monday)

[halfhumanhalfasleep]

Dandelions are a given but my favorites are purple false foxglove, blue mistflower, blue toadflax, and foxglove beardtongue

love me some Shapes

What's everyone's favourite flowers that aren't like. The normal ones. Like everyone's a fan of roses and sunflowers what's a more niche one. One you don't get in gift sets. Mine's sweet peas

[sir-squibbly]

Found a leaf-cutter bee today

Don’t mind the wasp he’s just chillin

[hyssopandbee]

Blue mistflower, harbinger of fall!

[headspace-hotel]

kinda fascinated by how there appears to be two different firefly species in my back yard now. One is the normal fireflies everyone knows with the yellow glow, and the other seems a little bigger and has a green glow, giving three flashes in quick succession.

They hang out around the meadow a lot. No success in catching the green-glow fireflies though because they tend to fly a little higher and have longer intervals in between their three-flash displays.

I saw a couple bumble bees today too! I am just so happy because since i've been tending to the Meadow, it is so full of life. Every day I see something new I've never seen before.

I need to get out there and take some proper photos, lol. I took a photo of my yarrow earlier but I haven't really been documenting the progress in pictures and I probably should

the yarrow was just kinda yanked up from an existing vegetative colony on the side of the road and stuck in a pot, I have yet to kill any yarrow i've randomly pulled up. Ridiculously easy plant to propagate. The plant in the center foreground is some kind of pink aster (i got it from the edge of the pavement in my neighborhood) and in the background you can see beebalm (dad ordered from a website) white boneset (also kidnapped from the edge of the pavement) chicory (volunteered) broomsedge bluestem (volunteered) Joe-Pye weed (dad also ordered from a website) and there should be a goldenrod or two (volunteered)

I have the benefit of having blessing to dig up plants from work, but most of the plants in here were just sorta rescued from gravel or asphalt where they somehow managed to sprout.

I now have dozens of evening primroses that all came from one single evening primrose that I literally pulled out of a crack in the pavement on the side of the road, planted in a pot and then in my front yard flower bed where it bloomed gorgeously and made loads of seeds. (I pulled another one out of a pothole early this year and it's also thriving!)

On a street down the road, there is literally a thriving population of Ruellia growing in the seam of the pavement along the curb and I'm growing like 4 of them.

That street is also where I got the blue mistflower originally I think, in some gravel next to a drainage ditch. The blue mistflower ALSO went to seed and made at least 2 new seedlings in some dirt this spring, 30 feet away from where I originally planted them.

Also we got some random oxeye daisy volunteers this year? And morning glory? I'm wary of the morning glory (that shit can take over) but my mom likes it sooooo

You know what you should really learn to identify though? Sedges. You can just rip those suckers out of the ground they don't care. The other day I was at the park tearing sedges up from the gravel path and putting them in a baggie with a wet paper towel. Same park where I pulled my Wingstem last year! I'm going to get in trouble one of these days probably

Don't go ripping plants out of their habitat where they're happy, but if some poor seedling popped up in a pile of gravel, that's free plant baby!

[meguminne]

Lovestruck Ajax!࿐ ࿔*:･ﾟ

call it unjust or prejudiced, but you’ve always found those with hydro visions a bit conceited, whether they know it or not. but that’s mostly due to childe’s fault. [drabble but more like a ramble] i just finished the fontaine story (no spoilers in the drabble!) and i just love him

‎ܓ perhaps it was thanks to the cruel hands of fate that you have had the displeasure of meeting such a man. his laughter was obnoxious, his eyes as deep as the sea; his smile is that of a fox’, and his bravado is so tall, you ought that its fall would be more cataclysmic than the fall of the great jade chamber.

༊ but if you chalked it up to fate, then perhaps you would think that celestia fancies itself a citizen of fontaine with its love for drama and theatrics.

༊ truly, there was nothing truly pleasant about the man they call ‘ajax,’ ‘childe,’ ‘tartaglia.’ his names don’t matter, he’s annoying all the way.

༊ at first you thought him quite handsome, save for the soulless blue eyes he has. you’ve bumped into him near the northland bank when you were browsing the books at the wanwen bookhouse, and you’ve chat with him a couple of times.

༊ you met again at the wangsheng parlor where he was particularly acquainted with the funeral director’s stoic secretary or whoever he was.

༊ by the tenth time, you wonder if you’re being stalked by the man with how often his face pops up even when you’re in sumeru, inazuma, monstadt and any of the seven nations!

༊ if you managed to find the land of khaenri’ah, you wouldn’t be surprised to see him there, ‘browsing the many places.’

༊ he would strike up a conversation without fail, always with that grin that makes you wonder if he’s practiced making such a stupid face in the mirror.

✎⟆ “oh, [y/n]! what a coincidence, i was just visiting mister zhongli! what brings you at such a grim place?”

✎⟆ “fancy seeing you here, my friend! it’s— it’s almost as if we’re fated to meet.”

✎⟆ “s-since you’re here anyways, why don’t i treat you to some dinner?”

༊ each time you find a reason to leave, you managed to get dragged back with promised words like a sumpter beast following a baited stick! not to mention how often he trips over his own words like a man trying to formulate a lie on the spot! ᝰ

༊ he doesn’t even hide the fact that he’s following you at times! even at the desolate deserts of sumeru, even in the dangerous plains of tatarasuna and somehow even found you in the chasm?!

༊ to have been found so intriguing that a harbinger of all people would be stalking you! it unsettled you to no end how much he loved stalking you! what does a sinister figure want with you!?

✃- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

˚◞♡ unbeknownst to you, childe was simply truly enamored with you and your little adventures.

˚◞♡ he’s grown to love how powerful and formidable you are when it comes to fighting. (even if your enemies were mere slimes!)

˚◞♡ he’s been meaning to ask you out directly on dates but your unsettled features and worried expressions made you look so adorable that he couldn’t help but tease you.

˚◞♡ he’s never had trouble with talking to people, but it seems he finds himself stumbling over his own words; perhaps it was because you were his weakness but the smile on his face never seems to fall with you around.

★⟆ “childe..”

✎⟆ “ajax,”

★⟆ “right, ajax, childe, tartaglia.. how did you find me here?”

✎⟆ “oh haha! i frequent this place a lot. you know, it’s quiet and peaceful. great for pondering,”

★⟆ “you.. frequent the chasm’s underbelly..?”

˚◞♡ bleegh! he’s so quirky and wacky, a harbinger not fluent with the language of deceit? say it ain’t so!

˚◞♡ he’s given you bouquets of rainbow roses, calla lilies and even mistflowers!

༊ it’s sweet and all but how did he get into your house?

˚◞♡ leave it to ajax to solely revive the tradition of courtship just for you to return the same fervor. bouquets, dates and ‘fated’ meetings are no issues so long as he gets to be with you.

[faguscarolinensis]

Conoclinium coelestinum / Blue Mistflower at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University in Durham, NC

[rjzimmerman]

In a Brutal Summer, Miracles Still Bloom. (New York Times Op-Ed)

Excerpt from this Op-Ed by Margaret Renkl from the New York Times:

Despite the heat, I take a daily census of my pollinator garden. Early September is peak insect season in Middle Tennessee, but I’m worried about my winged neighbors. Some butterflies and native bees are especially stressed by heat, and drought is hard on everybody. We can’t afford to lose any of our pollinators. In just the past 40 years, we’ve already lost nearly half the world’s insects.

Every day I am thankful to find my pollinator garden buzzing. The showiest summer perennials — beebalm and milkweed and coneflower and black-eyed Susan and Joe Pye weed and swamp rose mallow — are all bloomed out now, but the ironweed and mistflower and goldenrod and frostweed and blue lobelia and mountain mint and boneset are covered with winged and crawling things. Not all these creatures are feeding on flowers.

By the time I take my lunchtime stroll around the yard, the carpenter bees have taken over the zinnias and the black-eyed Susans. Their preferred flowers, the blooms of the passionvine, don’t open till later in the afternoon. Even the zinnias whose outer petals are missing, torn away by goldfinches harvesting seeds, are still pumping out pollen. The bees aren’t troubled by the missing petals.

I take immense pleasure from watching the carpenter bees work the passionflowers. Only a carpenter bee is large enough to pollinate a passionflower, and this year’s extravagant bounty of passionfruit attests to the bees’ work. A passionfruit isn’t ripe until it falls to the ground. Ripe passionfruit feeds birds and squirrels and opossums and foxes and raccoons and me.

Passionvine is the sole host plant of the gulf fritillary butterfly, and every day now the female butterflies flit above the vines, depositing eggs on the newest growth and the freshest tendrils. Soon the caterpillars will hatch and begin their own work of clearing the vines of leaves. Just as the ripe passionfruit begins to fall, the caterpillars will be emerging from their chrysalides. Butterflies.

I have come to rely on this deeply interdependent cycle: vine, leaf, flower, bee; butterfly, caterpillar, fruit, hungry wildlife. I cling to it as tightly as any goldfinch hanging upside down from a nodding sunflower. However tragically the climate crisis has disrupted other natural patterns, this one seems as sturdy as the drought-impervious passionvine itself, its roots anchored so deep in the soil I couldn’t pull them up if I tried.

Not every caterpillar survives to become a butterfly. That, too, is part of the cycle. Songbirds feed their young a diet made up overwhelmingly of caterpillars, which are soft, fat with nutrients, and no trouble to catch. If you want to feed the birds, you need to cultivate the plants that feed the caterpillars. In his 2019 book, “Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard,” the entomologist Douglas W. Tallamy notes that even the tiniest songbirds, like chickadees, require 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise a single brood of baby birds. In one way of looking at it, butterflies lay so many eggs because nestlings need so many caterpillars.

This is the time of year when weedy gardens like mine make their most persuasive argument for planting natives. A garden full of native wildflowers is a beacon for pollinators. The flowers attract the insects. The insects attract everybody else.