Wildflowers in My Neighborhood
August 13, 2023
A couple of weeks ago I walked down a street in my neighborhood that I don’t frequent very often. I was delighted to see that one side of the road was jam packed with wildflowers. Here are photographs of some of them.
1 Many of our ponds have names. This little one does not. The plants with purple flowers are pickerel weed. The yellow aquatic flowers are bladderwort.
2 Yellow coneflowers, purple coneflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, with lurking yellow mystery flowers, daisy fleabane, and bee balm: everyone gets along.
3 Purple coneflowers may be able to take a little shade, but I gave them a little more in processing this photograph.
4 Sometimes Canada thistle takes over, but this plant just fit in sweetly with the others.
5 Grass sprinkled its way around this patch of bee balm.
6 Standing a bit apart from most of the plants, another kind of grass was noticeably in flower.
7 Here’s more bee balm, keeping company with Queen Anne’s lace, ironweed, the mystery flower, and cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum).
8 The cup plant was the tallest in this wildflower garden.
9 The mystery plant looks a lot like the cup plant to me, but my live-in botanist assures me that it is not the same plant, though it, too, is a composite.
10 Steve Gingold identified this bee mimic as an Eristalis transversa, or transverse-banded drone fly. I think Steve’s fly is male and mine is female.
11 A friend says these yellow coneflowers are dancing.
12 Here they are prancing among the mystery flowers . . .
13 . . . and here they are keeping to themselves.
Romancing Reality 