The mornings are cool…a sign of fall. I headed out for a short walk around the neighborhood pond. There is always something to photograph.

There are two good sized willows at opposite ends of the pond. I photographed the one that seem healthier…no dead branches; its branches move gracefully in dapples of sunlight.

Some of the native plants added last spring near one of the bridges have survived. They will probably do even better next year. There was a skipper sitting on one that seemed to be holding still just for me!

In the water, a few of the pickerel weeds are thriving. There were quite a few that didn’t. Hopefully the plants growing now will propagate…begin to take some of the extra nutrients out of the water. There is a lot of algae in the water this fall.

The maples are beginning to show fall color. We’ve not had much rain the past few months so it might not be as brilliant this year although these maples are near the pond so perhaps they got enough water.

I only saw one turtle, and it was gone before I could get closer. There was a lot of mud on that side of the pond and I wondered if it was from the weed eating too close to the edge.

A river birch has leaves dipping into the water.

The stump from a tree one of neighbors cut down before we moved to area has almost completely decayed. There is some fungus still working on the last of it…and another of the same kind in the nearby grass that might have been working on a root from the old tree.

When I got back to my driveway I noticed a mushroom near the streetlight in a corner of my front yard. It may be that mulching of grass as I mow has increased the plant debris in the soil enough to support more kinds of mushroom – I hope that is what’s happening!

Continuing the posts about our hike at Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens in Washington DC…today the topic is everything I noticed other than the lotuses and dragonflies.

I looked for a shelf fungus on one the trees near the entrance that I’d seen over several years. It was gone but there was some pancake looking fungus patches on one of the high branches!

There were other flowers blooming:

2021 06 IMG_4745 (2).jpg — Pickerel Weed. In past years it attracted tiger swallowtail butterflies. I didn’t see any in the gardens this year.

Hibiscus. Not as many as in previous years. This one was growing at the edge of one of the ponds.

Water lilies. There were none of the giant lily pads that have been at Kenilworth in previous years and some of the ponds usually filled with water lilies were open water…but there were enough for a few pictures.

Button bush. Again – not as many as I remembered. I wondered what happened to them since it seems like they would be durable along the pond edges from year to year.

Trumpet vine. A robust native. My mother planted one in the 1960s in a corner of our back yard and then battled it with pruners to keep it from deconstructing the fence.

We walked on the boardwalk out to the mash and river. I was hoping to see herons but didn’t spot any.

At the very end there was a tree with lots of seeds growing in the loop of the boardwalk. It looks like a tree of heaven….a non-native and very invasive. I was surprised that it had not been cut down.