Mostly pink

These are a few of the flowers from my garden, a week or so ago.

Dahlia, against a background of azalea leaves.

From buds to wilted remains.

I don't understand how one hydrangea bush can have flowers from yellow to pink to blue to lilac.

This one's not in my garden. I found it in the bush, near an old apple tree. There is no sign anywhere near of human habitation, but someone must have planted them. This is an ornamental spiraea, not native to this area.

Sweet William, Dianthus barbatus, escaped from a pot years ago.

I went out today to take photos of my vegetable garden flowers. The zucchini and the cilantro are loaded with blooms, but the deer have eaten most of the scarlet runner bean tops. And then it started to rain. I'll try again when it stops raining.

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Estas son algunas de las flores en mi jardín, hace una semana.

1. Una dalia con hojas de azalea de fondo.
2. Dalias, desde botones hasta las flores ya marchitas.
3. No entiendo como es que las flores de un solo arbusto de hortensia pueden salir amarillas, color de rosa, azules, o color lila.
4. Este arbusto no está en mi jardín. Lo encontré en el bosque, cerca de un manzano viejo. No hay ningún indicio cercano (aparte de estas dos plantas) de residencia humana, pero alguien debe haberlos sembrado. Estas flores son de una Spiraea sp., pero no una de las especies nativas.
   
5. Clavel del poeta, Dianthus barbatus; esta planta brotó desde la tierra de una maceta rota, hace años; ahora vive debajo de un rosal.

Salí hoy, pensando sacar fotos de las flores de las plantas comestibles de mi jardín; las calabacitas y el cilantro están cargadas de flores, pero los venados se han comido casi todas las flores de frijol escarlata. Y mientras contemplaba esto, empezó a llover, y dejé el proyecto para cuando salga el sol otra vez.

Arbutus to young maple

Things seen while I was searching for spiders and finding mushrooms, in no particular order. (Well, it appears that Blogger decided to load them in alphabetical order by the file name. I won't argue.)

A look at the trunk of an arbutus. Inner bark, brick-red peeling bark, older bark.

This inner layer of the bark of the arbutus is photosynthetic, like the leaves.

Dangling cat-tail moss in a dark forest setting.

Tiny lichens on a pear tree. Inset; showing brown spikes (rhizines) on the underside.

More lichens on the same branch.

Aging hydrangea.

A young maple shows off its crop of orange leaves.

And there were a few pink flowers. I'll leave those for tomorrow.

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Y aquí hay algunas cosas vistas mientras yo buscaba arañas y encontraba hongos. Blogger decidió organizar las fotos en orden alfabético; no tengo problema.

1. Las tres cortezas de un madroño del Pacífico, Arbutus menziesii. La corteza nueva, la capa interior, es capaz de fotosíntesis, igual que las hojas.
2. El musgo común, "musgo cola de gato", colgado de una rama en un bosque oscuro.
3. Líquenes en una rama de un peral. El rectángulo muestra las protuberancias en la parte inferior de las hojas, llamadas rizinas.
4. Otros líquenes en la misma rama.
5. Flores de hortensia ya bien pasadas mostrando todavía algunos tintes tenues.
6. Un arce de hoja grande juvenil luciendo sus hojas anaranjadas.

Había, además algunas flores color de rosa. Esas las dejaré para mañana.

Aging well

 Another rainy day, with snow at noon, and rain to wash it all away by supper time.

So, another photo from storage.

Fading hydrangea, at the end of October.

Summer hydrangeas are beautiful, but I love the textures they develop in the fall. This one is tied together with spider webs, and I think there's a zebra jumping spider in the centre of one of the flowers.

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Otro dia de lluvia, con nieve a mediodía, y por la tarde suficiente lluvia para hacerla desaparecer por completo.

Aquí otra foto de los archivos: una hortensia, ya pasada de su frescura de verano, a finales de octubre.

Las hortensias son bellas en verano, pero me gustan las texturas y colores que se desarrollan por el otoño. Esta viene amarrada con telarañas, y creo que hay una araña saltarina cebra en el centro de una de las flores.

Losing the blue

 I love how hydrangeas age.

Newish hydrangea flowerhead

On the same bush, same day, two older flowerheads.

And today I noticed that the tops of our deciduous trees are turning red. Fall is here.

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Me gusta como las hortensias cambian de color mientras la flor envejece.

Las fotos muestran ramos florales en un mismo arbusto, el mismo dia; el primero es nuevo, los otros ya perdieron el color azul.

Winter warmth

And it's December already. And winter is upon us. I saw thick ice on roadside puddles here in town today; lawns are frosted white; my nasturtium plant, that yesterday was stretching out new leaves to the sun, lies dead. I brought in my potted succulents, too late to save one.

We get 8 hours of daylight now, bright, cold daylight. And clear skies in the long night, with sparkling stars overhead and Christmas lights on house fronts.

Longjohns and tuque weather. A good time to look at old photos from warmer days.

October hydrangeas, half dried. With maple "wings".

And with stink bug with orange rim spots. Holcotethus sp.

Welcome home!

Hydrangeas, alyssum, and Sweet William at my door.

Up a few steps, so they're just at eye level when I leave the car.

So pink!

For a minute, there, I can almost forget the news.

A few more garden delights

And June's not over yet!

Hydrangeas, close up, look like water-colour paintings.

And roses look like roses. One of these days, they'll figure out how to transmit scent over the web. So sweet!

I was kneeling on our excuse for a lawn, taking photos of a buttercup (too vibrantly yellow, too glossy, too dancing-in-the-wind happy for my camera) when a baby leafhopper dropped out onto a leaf below.

Leafhopper nymph, almost completely colourless. Against drying moss, with a few spare blades of grass.

Passion fruit flower. Or is it a visiting mini-ship from outer space, parked in a neighbour's garden? Or just Ma Nature using up leftovers from beetle production?

Tomorrow: anther unexpected beastie in my tank.

Unexpected colour

It is still raining, but I went out and did a bit of garden clean-up; cut rotting hosta leaves, dead-headed the astilbe, murdered a few slugs, trimmed a hanging basket. And brought in the last of the hydrangea flower heads to dry for a winter bouquet.

These hydrangeas were pale blue, but as they've aged on the shrub, they have turned a dark, dull purple. Looking at them inside, under a bright light, the purple split into splotches and veins of vibrant blues and reds.

Three different flowers here.

On one of the petals, a dust spot moved and, under my magnifying glass, turned out to be a yellow and black spider.

If you look very closely, you can see the silk thread leaving her spinnerets.

She's about the right size to hunt springtails and mites.

Pinhead spiders, pinhead spider food

With the onset of fall weather, we've been hurrying to finish postponed summer gardening chores, and settle the gardens in for the rains. In the last three days, Laurie chopped down a small tree and we dug out its roots. By hand, digging and chopping, prying and scraping. I thought we'd never get it done. I've finished cutting down the summer's crop of ivy that was making a new onslaught on our evergreens. The rhododendrons are pruned. My shade garden is cleaned up, fertilized and mulched. The hawkweeds are no more.

Whew!

I was too tired to look at the blog yesterday.

This afternoon, the last thing I (thought) I would do before I quit for the day was to cut off a couple of old hydrangea flower heads whose stems had broken.

There were spiders among the drying petals. I went for the camera.

Worn out dark blue hydrangea

The spiders were all tiny, some barely big enough to cover a pinhead, some slightly bigger, but more mobile.

I snapped umpteen variants of this; Ma spider just slipping around to the far side of the stem.

And as I chased spiders, I found a whole community of critters, so small that I hadn't realized they were there. So that's what all the spiders have been eating!

Snail, a couple of millimetres across.

Another snail.

Whiteflies. About 1 - 2 mm. A pest, but they weren't too numerous. And winter is coming.

Baby American house spider. Probably eats whiteflies; they're about her size.

Another one. These were so small that I couldn't see what they were with the naked eye.

A small meadow spittlebug, Philaenus spumarius, about 1/4 inch long. Another of the critters that keep moving to the far side of the leaf.

A very small weevil that I couldn't identify. I like his back markings; the back side of a comic-book hawk? A Sasquatch in a rain cape?

Earwig hiding in the crotch of a flower stem. A composite; one photo had the head in focus, another had the tail. And none had the middle. And then the 'wig ran away.

This earwig was from a few days earlier, on a rhododendron leaf. I really want to get a good photo because I love the markings on the thorax. Try again!

This spider, and several others like her, fell out of the flower heads as I de-leafed them. They're very fast runners.

Chased but not caught: a flock of those orange flies with the red, red eyes. And I put my head, again, through a cross spider's web.