Zooming – November 2016

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November is my second month with my new camera (Canon PowerShot SX720 HS). My earlier posts this month have used a lot of zoomed images…but I’m sharing 7 in this post that are new. The first is an immature milkweed bug. See the stubs where the wings will be in a later instar? In October, I thought they would gone by November but the weather stayed reasonably warm and there were still green milkweed pods well into the month. Some of the bugs probably didn’t make it to maturity before the first frost.

November included the brightest fall color this year. I like the light shining through these maple leaves.

The Bald Cypress cones were more obvious against the rusty brown of the foliage being shed this time of year.

Ferns have sporangia on their underside; these reminded me of the dots on dominos.

Inside the conservatory at Brookside the banana plant had maturing fruit.

I’m not sure what this is…but it is growing (and blooming) in the Brookside Gardens conservatory.

I discovered Virginia Creeper growing on the brick in front of my house. It is turned red with the cooler temperatures.

Walking in Brookside Gardens

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I’ve already posted about the serendipity and the catbird from my walk in Brookside Gardens last week. There were plenty of ‘normal’ scenes that I enjoyed too along with quite a few people walking the loop around the gardens. Here are some highlights:

The white wash is still on the conservatory. It’s there to help reduce the heat of summer inside but is washed off once it gets cool enough in the fall.

There are still flowers blooming.

And the seed pods of the magnolias have their bright red seeds (they always remind me of red M&Ms).

Some of the leaves are beginning to turn but most are still green.

I’ve been reading so much about the rusty patched bumble bees that I’ve started paying more attention to all bumble bees (this was is obviously not a rusty patched)!

Caster plants have maturing seeds. I always notice these at Brookside because one of my grandfathers always had a few plants in his garden.

The Tea House was empty as I walked by…the pond cloudy with sediment after recent rains.

Some of the ferns had spores on the underside of their fronds.

My last stop of the morning was in the conservatories. They were just setting up the mum displays --- and none were blooming enough to photograph – yet. I’ll go back in November. Along with a lot of gardeners working the garden, there were also people putting up lights already in preparation for the display beginning around Thanksgiving.

Brookside Fiddleheads

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The fiddleheads were another sign of spring at Brookside Gardens last week. I enjoy seeing how the fronds of different ferns start out so tightly packed and then unfurl in graceful curves.

Some start out very fuzzy looking. It is hard to image the frond from the fiddlehead form.

Some of the fiddleheads are further along and the expansion of the frond nearest to the stem happens rapidly enough to make it look like the tip of the frond is a knot…but is simply has not expanded quite yet.

Sometimes I imagine other things that look a little like fiddleheads  - like intricate round earrings heavy enough to weight their wire

Or the tentacles of an octopus.

I generally thing about fiddleheads being near circular but there are exceptions – the oval shape shows up almost as often.

Fiddleheads are another sign of spring – the harbingers of the lush ferns of summer.

Intimate Landscapes - April 2016

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I skipped February and March for an intimate landscapes post (after Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book available online here) but am starting them again this month.

In the roots and moss on a path in Centennial Park – I saw a parallel to crossroads on a map or visualized a decision at the fork of a road that has been taken by others but not enough to wear away the moss.

Low growth thrives at the base of a tree and surrounds a stump. A Jack-in-the-Pulpit is blooming there too.

The skunk cabbage surrounds the trees along a now hidden stream and the ferns are filling in the remaining spaces under the trees.

The thick oxalis almost overwhelms the cairns when the sun is shining (the plant’s flowers close up at night and cloudy days). Other plants cover other items with their foliage. The lighter green in the background will be pink lilies later in the summer.

Here an old stump provides a dark backdrop to the pink and yellow of spring flowers.

Fern Feathers

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When I was at Brookside Gardens in late March, I thought at first I was seeing feathers sticking out of the brown bald cypress and moss mulch. But it was dried ferns from last fall! They were close to the boardwalk – protected from being stepped on because they were lower than where everyone walked.

I looked at the structure more closely and it was obvious they were ferns that had simply dried and remained standing.

Some of them almost glowed in the dappled sunlight that

Made its way through the still bare branches of the trees above.

I wonder how long they will last into the spring and summer. I’ll look for them again each time I go to Brookside.

Mauna Ulu and Sulphur Banks Trail

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The first part of our last day in Hawaii was spent in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We drove a short distance down Chain of Craters Drive. We made a quick stop to overlook the Kilauea Iki Trail and I couldn’t resist photographing a fern with crescent shaped sori (clusters of sporangia that contain spores….the beginning of the next generation of ferns).

Our first hike was toward Mauna Ulu - a lava landscape formed from 1969-1974. Like the other trails where plants are sparse – it is marked by cairns. But these cairns are harder to spot because there are so many piles of rocks in the landscape. We must have missed a cairn fairly early on and wondered around a little before we found it again.

There are lots of glassy rocks on this hike and sometimes the lava makes little cracking sounds when you walk on it.

My daughter picked up several pieces of rocks for me to photograph – a lot of color and texture variety. She probably should have been wearing her gloves since tiny shards of glass come off these rocks. I got one in my thumb when I picked up one.

I took pictures of plants that were colonizing the lava too. This area gets plenty of rainfall but is still a very harsh environment. The plants manage to find enough for their survival in tiny cracks. Sometimes they appear to grow out of solid rock! Every bit of green or red catches your attention in a place like this.

There were some lava trees that look very ‘fresh’ with distinct and sharp edges.

There is a sparse forest that one hikes through as the trail leads upward. The lava is relatively smooth and compacted by all the previous hikers (i.e. no little cracking sounds when you walk on it). It still takes a lot of energy to walk along the undulating path. We turned around before reaching the end of the hike.

The last hike we did in the park was back near the visitor center – the Sulphur Banks Trail. It is an easy hike along a board walk.  There are vents on both sides. The Sulphur shows up as yellow splotches mixed with white (gypsum), milky glaze (opal), and red (hematite).

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