#Spreading dogbane

[vandaliatraveler]

Photos above are from a trip into the mountains yesterday. I managed to get out to Lindy Point in the Blackwater River Canyon before the overlook was swarmed with sightseers (top two photos). The rhododendron is blooming now - the drive in from Blackwater Falls State Park is magical this time of year. As it descends through the canyon, the Blackwater River transforms into turbulent whitewater, but just above the canyon, where it turns out of Canaan Valley (5th photo down), it's a gentle, serene stream perfect for floating. I also tried out some different trails in Yellow Creek Natural Area and Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The lowbush blueberries are ripening now - a sweet little snack to improve the hiking experience. :-)

[mothmiso]

Mountain Road bridge (2) (3) (4) by ronald embree

[thebotanicalarcade]

n17_w1150 by Biodiversity Heritage Library Via Flickr: The botanic garden ;. London :Simpkin & Marshall,1825-. biodiversitylibrary.org/page/52564831

[headspace-hotel]

so many of us haven't seen it

we don't encounter it, we can't imagine it, we can't get out of the tomb of apathy because we haven't seen the wonders just beyond their line of sight

I talk about this all the time, but it's because I think about it all the time

There are likely thousands of plants native to the area you live in, and chances are you have never even seen most of them, in your entire life.

Not even rare orchids that only bloom at midnight on a blood moon or some shit—regular flowers. Weeds. They have been systematically eliminated from every single place you ever set foot in, and you have to have a special hobby or line of work to ever even rest your eyes upon the flowers that used to bloom for no one on every hill, or in every valley, or beside every stream

There are a few hundred birds that live where I live. I have never seen most of them before. I have never seen a Kentucky Warbler, and I have lived in Kentucky for what...twenty years?

I have never seen a rosy maple moth. When I saw one on the internet, I didn't even think it was real.

I've become a deeply weird person over the past couple years. Tasting even a little bit of the Wonders changes you. I wouldn't have thought blue bees were real, or the fantastically rainbow-colored dogbane beetles.

I have seen the world beyond the wasteland, and that glimpse makes you crazy.

You or I may have never seen a truly mature tree. A fraction of a percent of the old growth forest of the Eastern USA remains. Once there were tulip poplars over 6 feet in diameter and sycamores well over 10 feet in diameter. Only a few remain, in secret locations. Imagine walking through a forest where the tree trunks are over 3-4 feet wide.

The forest where I work is 100 years old. That's a baby forest.

Knowing that, being aware of that, it's maddening.

Central Kentucky has disproportionately few endemic plants. Almost none. Central Kentucky was the first area west of the Appalachians settled by European colonizers. The Bluegrass was once described as having the most peculiar plant life anywhere in the East, but now, there are no species known that are unique to that area.

Colonization destroyed the canebrakes. (Did you know that we had vast forests of bamboo full of carnivorous plants?) The bamboo is barely hanging on. It destroyed the sycamores so enormous you could use the hollow center of one as a stable for animals. It introduced invasive grasses to feed cattle and horses. It destroyed the rich lush topsoil. Most of the ancient oaks were cut down or died when housing developments were built on top of their roots.

What happened to the endemic species, never recorded in books of herbs, never sketched by a European naturalist.

Either gone forever...or hiding in a sinkhole on a backroad somewhere, not even yet discovered.

So much has been lost for eternity. So much still could be lost.

Some days it's hard not to wail and scream. There are herbicides in your drinking water. When you spread honey on toast, you likely also spread neonicotinoid pesticides, which testing has confirmed to be present in something like 45% of honey. In many areas, insects are immersed in the presence of chemicals designed to kill them in every drop of water, every leaf, every square inch of soil.

When games, animations, and illustrations envision the outdoors, they cover the ground with a short, uniform carpet of green, because that is what we see, no matter where we go: turfgrass cut by a lawn mower. Where I live, there are no natural environments that resemble this, remotely. The closest thing we have to turf-forming grass is our wealth of native sedges, most of which are rare or endangered.

I talked to a man who had devoted his life to studying the American bamboo, Arundinaria gigantea, and he had never seen a canebrake larger than 200x500 feet. Canebrakes once covered ten million acres, and now the bamboo exists in short, straggly clumps instead of dense bamboo forests up to 40 feet tall.

I want to cry and scream. The grief will tear me to pieces. I live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, surrounded by people who can't even grieve, because they have been so completely severed from everything that was lost that they don't even know it was real.

It hurts. It hurts, and we have to live with it. It hurts, and the grief is all-consuming.

There is the agony, and there are the Wonders. Both are true at the same time. It is because nothing around us is standing still; everything in nature is always moving, iterating, becoming. Something is pulling and nudging at our species, urging us to move, to iterate, to become.

So much has been lost. Even more is not lost.

The trees, the bamboo, the sedges, the Kentucky warblers and rosy maple moths.

They are not lost. We are lost.

This is the hard part. The grief is hard, but this is somehow harder for us. We are lost, and it is time to come home.

Not to a physical place, but to a way of living: interconnected, mutualistic, interdependent. Symbiosis. In the forest, no one is separate from anyone else, everyone is linked and dependent on the community. Trees help each other, they support each other, they protect and shelter and feed one another and all living things, and together they are a forest. I don't really consider myself religious, but I have to reserve something in my head for how it felt to realize what Forest was.

When I noticed the little plants popping up in the sidewalk cracks and gravel paths, the tough weeds holding on in the lawns and pavement, something in my brain began to change dramatically and permanently.

They're still here. The trees. Even in the pavement and lawns. The dandelions have come, adapting rapidly, helping the bees hold on. The wildflower seeds are still sprouting in this depleted ground. Waiting for us to recognize them. Life is everywhere. The Forest is everywhere. It felt like they were waiting. We're here. We have not abandoned you. We are resilience, persistence, survival, adaptation. This is not death. This is Chaos. Come home. Come home. Come home.

I saved little plants from the roadside and tended them in plastic cups. I didn't think it would work. I don't know why I tried. I was acting as something bigger than only myself, responding to a call that moves throughout all of nature. But they survived, and growing and tending to my little plants and trees, I—understood.

I don't know if I believe in God, but I believe in Something, whatever it was that seemed to whisper like a secret: Welcome home, Caretaker.

And honestly, truth shone through then from relics of religion I hadn't touched in ages; God put Adam in a garden, not a suburb, a mall, or a Walmart. This is who you are. Not a Consumer, but a Caretaker.

And when the threat of the Flood loomed, God told Noah to start building a fucking boat.

In ecology, the plants we know as "weeds" are pioneer species: the first species to return to an area after a natural disaster or mass extinction. They survive in the harshest conditions, and prepare the land for regeneration. This is who you must become.

Look to the Dandelion—in just a few hundred years on this continent, Dandelion has risen to the highest calling of a Weed: first survive where the others can't, and then help the others survive. If the human species is to survive, you must be a weed species. You must adapt relentlessly, resist eradication, and protect and nurture other life forms by your very nature. You must be tough as nails, and make the world a gentler place through your survival.

Have you heard the saying that grief is love with no place to go?

That's the hard part.

We must grieve, but it is not yet time to grieve. It is time to love.

[landwriter]

familiar faces of july

elderflower / lily and hairy vetch / spreading dogbane / chicory / yarrow / forget-me-not / st john's wort / thimbleberry

[solarpunkswy]

Here are some plants native to Wyoming that you can put in gardens or seed bombs!

Sagebrush steppe

Badlands mules-ears

Indian paintbrush

Bitterroot

Porter's sagebrush

Blazing star

Fuzzy tongue penstemon

Rocky Mountain iris

Ute ladies'-tresses

Arrowleaf balsamroot

Showy milkweed

Columbian monkshood

Red windflower

Rock jasmine

Nodding onion

Spreading dogbane

Mountain deathcamas

Androsace septentrionalis

Anthemis cotula

Agoseris glauca

Orange agoseris

Amelanchier utahensis

Leafy Arnica

Please let me know if I got any of these wrong or if you have other flowers native to Wyoming!

[julieonholiday]

We stopped at this stream - the flora was rich and beautiful. Not sure but I think these are thimbleberry, spreading dogbane, and twinberry honeysuckle.

[mbsposts]

20200713 MP294 Moses Cone Blue Ridge Parkway NC

SPREADING DOGBANE or BITTERROOT Apocynum androsaemifolium

[photonine]

Spreading Dogbane

[anotheralbatross]

Spreading Dogbane

[cocoa-coated-fish]

Not going to lie, one of my favorite parts of editing this was looking up what kind of flower this is. It’s called spreading dogbane!

[vandaliatraveler]

Spreading dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium) is one of the great pollinator plants of early summer, which is no surprise given that it resides in the same family (Apocynaceae) with milkweed, another essential pollinator plant that blooms concurrently with dogbane. Both milkweed and dogbane produce a milky latex, which varies in toxicity to animals and people. But oh that nectar . . . In just the minute I stopped to take these photos, the subject plant was assailed by a lovely Virginia Ctenucha (Ctenucha virginica) moth, North America's largest wasp moth; a great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele); and a small skipper (Hesperiidae).

Photos taken at the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

[sunnygrey99]

The Silent Witch In The Woods Pt. 7

~Trigger Warning: Gore, Typical TWD warnings. (minors DNI)~

A/N: Sorry It took me so long to start posting these again. I've been really sick recently and stressed from moving. I hope You all enjoy this chapter. More to come soon.

Autumn turns quickly to winter and as harvest comes to an end you've switched to overseeing the health of the livestock as well as helping in the infirmary when needed. It's a nice change in pace and allows you to spend more to yourself. This change also has downsides. Daryl was for the most part only around you when he came home after working on cars or when he comes back from hunting. It is a good time to hunt since most of the walkers are frozen or stuck somewhere and most animals had taken to repopulation very well. Daryl always comes back with something for the town.

As glad as you are for what Daryl does for the community you miss him greatly. Every time he leaves is like letting a piece of your heart go along with him. It's still dangerous out there and you are always worried that he will just never come back home. Anytime he comes back after a long three-day hunt you find him huddling to your room to sleep again. The company is appreciated, but you never tell him how much it really means to you that he holds you so close. He almost always smells of fresh snow, pine trees, and dirt. Oddly a pleasant scent to fall asleep to and sometimes wake up to when he comes back late in the night.

Tonight is no such night that you'll wake up to that smell and when you do finally wake up you feel the worry spread through your chest like an infection. It's day four and Daryl never stays gone for that long. You bring up the information to Rick and he only brushes you off saying that Daryl is capable and will be back any day now. When nears day ten of Daryl missing Rick takes your concern seriously. It's when a search group is about to head out that Daryl finally stumbles through the front gate. You both lock eyes as he comes into the gate and he collapses to his knees. Covered in his own blood he grabs at his left side, seeming to shake slightly at the obvious blood loss. You run to him instantly and try keeping your cool to help him. It's difficult, but you're able to have Abraham and Rick carry Daryl to the infirmary.

Once Daryl is laid flat on the bed you glance over him and quickly cut his shirt off him to better see his wounds. By the looks of it, he's lucky to even be alive. Pale skin coated in old dark smears of blood and dirt. You begin to panic as you see the bullet wound that goes through Daryl's chest on his left. You freeze as you wonder how the man isn't dead yet. The only thing to snap you out of it is Daryl weakly reaching his hand over to grab yours. You look to it for a moment and nod. His only hope to surviving the wound is to do the very same spell you'd done to yourself. Steeling yourself and taking a deep breath before putting yourself into a healer's headspace.

Quickly you grab the paste and write the runes around the bullet hole before placing the dogbane in the center. You grab Daryl's chin and make him look at you, This is going to hurt really bad. I need you to try and stay calm. Squeeze my hand and Rick's as hard as you need to. You wait for him to nod before pulling Rick to grab Daryl's other hand and hold down the same arm. You guide Abraham to hold Daryl's shoulders and then carefully cut your hand and press it to Daryl's wound. It's nearly instant that your hand heats up and Daryl screams in agony as he arches his back off the table. He goes limp under your touch and you freeze again. The panic fully sets in as you look at his face. Looking for any sign of life you grab his face and tap his cheek. The two men step back and Rick has his hand hovering over his knife. You check his pulse and it feels fine. Pressing your head to his chest and silence is all you can hear until the first beat pounds through his chest. You wait there to hear another just to be sure, and there it is. You pull back with the tears streaming down your face and look at Rick with a faint and tired smile. He's alive. He's okay. You go back to check his wounds. It seems to be healed for the most part but you know you'll be putting him on bed rest for a week anyway.

Daryl wakes up the next morning with you curled up on the couch in the corner. He attempts to get up but hisses and groans at the pain. It has you shooting up out of your spot and standing next to him in an instant. You can't move too much. I had to cast a spell and you'll be in a lot of pain for the next few days. It's best to rest. He looks at you with confusion etched into his features for a moment but then looks to his bare chest and the still angry red spot where there had been a hole just a day ago. He sighs and reaches out lightly grabbing your hand and muttering a small thanks.

Squeezing his hand back with a reassurance that you wouldn't be leaving anytime soon you pulled a chair over and sat next to his bed. The faint smile etched into his lips as he watches you, his crystal blue eyes never leaving your eyes. Once you find a comfortable position in the old wooden chair you find yourself fighting the urge to just climb in bed next to the man as you look at him. You should get some more rest. I'll still be here for you if you need anything.

He only rolls his eyes sightly with a quiet chuckle. "I ain't tried anymore. 'Sides you're here and I' been gone too damn long."

Well if you aren't going to rest, can you tell me what happened out there? You can see the light smile that was there fall and his eyes dim with a grim mood.

"Ain't much to say. Group a guys tryin' ta take my hunt. Woulda let 'em if that was all they wanted. Not like I was lookin' fer trouble." He huffs as he recalls the encounter. "They took me back to their camp and their leader decided he wanted ta keep me. I ain't about that so I tried runnin' got shot in the process." He isn't looking at you anymore but you decide to reach out and lightly squeeze his arm to get his attention.

I'm sorry Daryl. You don't have to tell me anymore if you don't want. The genuine concern is written all over your face and you know he can see it but you don't want to push him for more information. You are already aware of how little the man talks about his oldest traumas, so talking about fresh ones isn't ideal for the stoic man. I'm going to set up extra protections tonight to warn us if this group comes after you. I don't want anyone else I care about getting hurt.

Daryl reached over tugging your hand slightly and mutters another thanks before changing the topic to pass the time. He already knows better than to fight you about staying in the lumpy hospital bed that he'll grow restless in for the next week.

Part 8

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[fischotterkunst]

found these lovely little blossoms along my driveway while hauling down the bin - theyre Spreading Dogbane (Apocynum androsaemifolium).

6/23/22

[o5-blackbird]

M!A: dogbane flowers spread in a circle around Six

I still hate flowers.