Did a little reference reading today. Question remains: shagbark or shellbark hickory.
Rich color as well as tasty.
My older son made some nice tart wild grape jelly decades ago – on cream cheese on a bagel it was wonderful!
My sister has lived in Greensboro for quite a while. It’s beautiful and green (I lived near Asheville for a year, too, further inland in the mountains), but she did mention they don’t have lakes like Michigan. Do you know why that is the case? Is there more limestone there? Thanks
Though it’s late summer and in the evening, this same shot will be a thousand times better in mid fall early morning. The grasses that are not quite in focus will be fully blooming. It’s the pink muhly grass. So it’s this fluffy cotton candy pink flower that will be highlighted by early indirect morning sunlight.
Some more bog pins, liatris, and white star grasses.
I forget the name of the blue flower.{ I believe it’s one of the Eryngium species . Possibly E. integrifolium. It’s in the rattlesnake master genus.}
It will come to me later. But it’s that, white star and the seed heads of meadow beauty that looks like little cups. It was a nice gathering of them.
Some images trying to capture what I was seeing of thousands of grass heads glowing from the sun. The sun plays a big role in highlighting grasses to the point some cultivars are named after morning, overhead or setting light.
Feeding on the liatris.
Assassin Bugs mating on the berries of a winged sumac.
Leaf bug nearby them.
Your “mediocre” photos are just stunning. Wow. Thank you for sharing them. They’re always a delight.
Are those pink flowers in the first photo loose strife?
Pretty but invasive in MI.
Slander! (I know you were addressing Mi’s soft sell.) But these are stunning. Early morning is my favorite time of day.
It felt slanderous to say it, too. Mi does amazing work with that camera.
Early morning…
I’ve been trying to be outside more lately, since this summer I spent at my desk with computer and book! I’ve been stepping out on the back deck more, while it’s still dark. Sometimes, due to my middle-aged sleep habits, it’s still way before sunrise. We live fairly rural, so there’s only a little light pollution . Mmmmhmmmm. Those stars. The back yard has a nice hill for toboggans and star-gazing, facing north. It’s fun to go out on a sleeping bag with the binos. We can see the Milky Way. Youngest is visually impaired, and the first time she looked through the binoculars, she was stunned.
Those flowers are liatris, which goes by the common names of blazing star or gay feather. Though it’s one of the plants I hear going by liatris more than a common name. They are in a different genus and I think even different tribe than loosestrife.
I just meant that in summer the plant is just this slender leafed green plant that is almost invisible but in fall it turns into this pink feathery misty looking thing. The pink muhly grass.
Here is one I just took from the upstairs deck where we just had dinner. The dog trainer I’ve been working with and I had our last session yesterday. This morning she texted to say she tested positive for Covid last night. So we’re masking in common rooms and the car but not on walks and we eat separately except when we can do so outside like tonight. As we were finishing Lia remarked on the sunset so I jumped up to take this looking over our fig tree and through the telephone wires across the street. The palm tree is attractive enough though. Not a sunup sadly but still nice in its own way.
Stunning! Thank you!
Glorious, Mark! Thank you for sharing this, too.
Got lucky and caught this “lunar flare”.
About to crash. Well past my bedtime.
I personally think cloud iridescence is so much prettier than rainbows and definitely prefer the ones created by moonlight.
I wanted very much last night to get some night photos. Such a gorgeous night with the moon. So bright I had afterimages looking at the tree line.
My equipment just isn’t up to that task, or the user doesn’t know the settings.
I use a iPhone. I bought the 13+ a while back because my iPhone 7 broke. I had the same phone for since it came out. Like around 14/15. I don’t know how to really use it. I prefer taking pictures with the 7. This phone has a third lens on it and so many times when I have the shot I want, it suddenly jumps to the third lens and will offset it by a few inches when often places the thing I want out of the shot. I’ve almost smashed my phone over how annoying it is. But I’m sure I’ll get it down. Biggest thing is just being steady and trying the image at different angles. It just depends on what you want to highlight. Like all three of these are the same scene just going up a foot in height each time and changing the zoom and focus.
They all highlight different aspects. The first one is from my head level basically. I don’t like it. It does not accent the plants really well in my opinion. But if there was dozens of species and I simply wanted to capture the color scheme then that’s how I would do it.
The second one I like more. It captures the chaos of all of the flower heads but I felt like it did very little to show their stalks and different heights. It just kind of looked like a layer of fuzzy green, beady white, green of trees and then the sky. So the color was layered vertically instead of what horizontally like I would do if there was several species. My favorite is the one I originally shared which should be the third pic in here. I felt it captured what I liked seeing. The different heights of the stalks and the white flowers blended into most layers. Though I enjoyed the image from all angles. When hiking I always drop down to plant level or below if possible not only to find hidden insects but it allows me to just see the plant from all over.
Nighttime pics are harder because they generally require exposure time when means being steady for several seconds and changing the brightness. I can’t take good moon pics, but it typically pics up and coloring in the clouds.
Thanks! That was super.
Visiting my daughter near Corpus Christi, hummingbirds are beginning to migrate through headed south,
I never see hummers mass like this though I’ve seen it in pics. In my yard it is hummer wars nonstop no matter how much is in bloom. But that is probably the advantage of feeders. In nature their mode of flight is pretty demanding in terms of fuel. They’re good at knowing how quickly flowers can replenish nectar but if other hummers are dashing in at odd moments to nip some that can cost them fuel expenditures that aren’t being adequately rewarding. I may have to bite the bullet and commit to providing feeders.
This photo from two years ago just came up among my ‘Facebook memories’. It’s my young Rainbow Gum, Eucalyptus deglupta from the Philippines.
And this is someone else’s photo of a mature tree. I wonder if my little guy can long survive and one day get this kind of color in our climate?
Beautiful! I am always surprised by the variety of plants and trees that grow that far north on the California coast–palms, eucalyptus, mixed with pines and redwoods. Thanks for sharing.
For my residency in 2/2004, I worked in the Parker Indian Reservation for a month. I took a 4 day weekend and traveled through Yosemite and Sequoia to just over the border in Oregon (snow), and back again. It was a beautiful drive. The Indian reservation was also very interesting–my roommate was a former child Indian film actor, who gave me some copies of his films. There were 5 tribes represented, and quite a cultural and linguistic variety.
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