I feel like handing out cigars. My Beshornaria ‘Flamingo Glow’ bloomed for the first time this past spring. That stalk must now die so I’ve been wondering if there would be pups and this week I noticed three coming up. Here are the two in front.
Looking forward to it becoming a fuller plant and blooming again sometime. Here are a few photos of it from when it first started pushing up its bloom stalk in January to when it was fully in bloom in May.
Those white things - Indian Pipe?- look almost more like a mushroom relative than a plant. Cool stuff.
They really are! From Wikipedia:
Unlike most plants, it is white and does not contain chlorophyll. Instead of generating energy from sunlight, it is parasitic, and more specifically a mycoheterotroph. Its hosts are certain fungi that are mycorrhizal with trees, meaning it ultimately gets its energy from photosynthetic trees. Since it is not dependent on sunlight to grow, it can grow in very dark environments as in the understory of dense forest. It is often associated with beech trees.[4] The complex relationship that allows this plant to grow also makes propagation difficult.
Monotropa uniflora - Wikipedia
Saw most of these this week on walks with my children. One sarsaparilla leaf smelled like root beer…maybe it was in my head. I played “Guess the plant” by comparing it with wintergreen to.my kids when they closed their eyes.
I’m not typically out where I’m likely to see arachnids – they find me. @LM77 just reminded me of this pseudoscorpion over a year ago in our shower room (not to scale 
):
Brilliant! Thanks Dale!
I wish smart phones with cameras had been around about thirty-five or forty years ago when my boys were young – we discovered a trapdoor spider on our place. It sure was interesting to watch.
Another version of walking stick. This one I have never seen before, so skinny I thought it was just a dried grass twig at first. App could not identify
I so rarely lol right out loud like that.
Yeah, it’s pretty funny – I think I did too.
The lion’s mane fungus is well named.
I got a surprise when I got back from throwing the ball for Smokey this morning. The first flower had opened on that big bromeliad, Alcantarea imperialis. Looks like each flower will be fairly large. Here is my hand for scale.
*Even though I keep two bowls of fresh water available both my dogs would rather drink out of the pond - preferably while standing in it.
Even though the air quality on the bay in Berkeley had improved enough to let the boy run hard, just to the east it is still really bad. You can see how red the sun is coming up through the trees in this other pic.
It’s beautiful! I am sorry for your fire–I was wondering how you were doing. Best wishes for safety.
Are you sure it’s lions mane? I’ve not seen them with that look before. Did something recently eat off of it?
Thanks! No, I am not sure…looking back, I thought that was what my app said…but maybe it was only a possibility. Do you have any idea? I will look up more too
I’m not sure what it is but I can look it up. I tried looking up a wide range of lions mane mushrooms and none looked like it. The closest was some that had the “mane” mostly eaten off of it by squirrels. I would not eat it if I was you until you were certain. I can try to look it up later on. Did you by any chance notice if it has pores or gills underneath it?
thanks. I’ll also look it up. I have an Audubon book, which I need to use. No, I didn’t look for spores or gills, but I will do that as they’re right on our property
We’ve got what looks like some kind of marbled orb weaver in our raspberry bushes. It’s usually skittish, but was out wrapping up a beetle today so I was able to get a decent picture of it. We had another one that was more orange in the exact same spot last year, so I wonder if this is a descendant of that one.
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