Plants and quasi-plants

I assumed this was a sphagnum moss, mainly because all my adult life I've called it that. But this morning, after taking this picture in a flower pot outside my back door, I looked up the mosses of Newfoundland and discovered there are eighty or a hundred species. Gulp. So I no longer know what it is. Pretty though. That's my pet Marchantia growing in the lower right.

I was still a teenager when, nearly fifty years ago, I stopped smoking cannabis. It is legal to grow a few plants now, at least here in Canada. So I bought some seeds from the government website and the seeds have now sprouted. I am as proud of the seedlings as I am of the garlic coming up in my garden.

And then, by lunchtime, it looked like this.

Late last spring, I brought home from the office my long-suffering Adenium plant. It had lived in a South-facing window for more than fifteen years and bloomed nearly all the time there. But at home the best window I could give it was smaller and Southeast-facing. It sulked and stopt blooming properly, instead hesitating and aborting the shows. But this morning I see this and perhaps it will start again.

Our cat loves to eat flowers and, in so doing, knock over their vases. So we end up hiding flowers where she cannot get them. Of course we often forget about them until they are old and wilting. Sigh. Thus this rose was found after a nearly two-week exile in a closed room. Most of its siblings went directly into the compost.

I wasn't sure which thistle this was: after several frosts, it has lost its main signs of life. But I am assured by someone who knows them better than I that it is a Bull thistle. Looking at its spiny leaves, not clear in this picture, I'd say so, too.

These are my friends Will and Suzanne. She is his mother and this was taken twenty-five years ago when he was eight years old. He has a daughter nearly that old now. They took me out, while waiting for supper, to the little meadow behind their house and then proceeded to blow dandelion seeds at each other. This was Ilford Delta 400 film in my Canonet.

As winter creeps in on us, more winter birds are showing up at our feeder. The mobs of goldfinches have been here for a few days (a few stragglers were here all summer). Today, with the mobs came two purple finches -- both female, so there's no sign of purple on them. Besides eating the seed in the feeder, they like the white berries of the waxball hedge.

The apple tree in our backyard is, by my estimation, sixty years old. It is probably the result of someone throwing a core to the fence and the seed coming up protected from trampling and mowing by bigger trees. Today it takes up a lot of space by itself and some years it produces a few dozen apples. Other years, like this one, it produces almost none. There are two apples on it, the entire product of the summer's effort, and one of them is so high I will have to leave it for the birds to pick at in the late-winter thaws. But this one I will eat.

When I walk to the mail box this time of year, my feet scrunch down on dozens of beech nuts from a neighbour's big tree. Every year I tell myself I'm going to gather a bunch together, roast them, and grind them into beech-nut butter. I haven't yet, and probably never will get around to it. Nice idea but I'm too lazy. Similarly, I really should learn how my *other* camera does focus bracketing. Or start using a tripod again to get smaller apertures for longer depth of field. Or something. More nice ideas for a lazy man. Meantime, I like what I see.

Lovely mushrooms appear in October month.

Walking along a busy road this morning, I saw this growing in the ditch. Birdsfoot trefoil is one of several names for it. Lotus corniculatus is its formal name.

Today I dug up the fruits of my little garlic garden: six cloves planted last fall. They produced delicious scapes, which I cooked in July, and six garlics. I hope they taste good because I'm not impressed by their size. In any case, I'll plant more this fall.

The waxball is probably the most common hedge-like bush in this town, largely because it has so completely naturalised itself here. It easily finds places to grow andit grows well. And it serves well the wasps and bees that are around in late August when it is blooming.

Another view of the forest fire. This is right at the western end of it, where it started and where its swath was narrowest. It's also very near where my grandfather dug a spring well in about 1930. He lived a thousand feet or so from this spot and he had a shallow well by his house. But his neighbours' cows kept breaking through the fence and he was worried they'd pollute his well. So he found a wet place at some distance and dug out a spring, making a pool he could draw water from when he needed it. It was just to the right of this picture. He stopped using it a few years later, and in later years it was lost. I found it again fifteen or twenty years ago and dug it out. It is still flowing today, year-round. It doesn't produce much water, and didn't help the firefighters a bit.

About six weeks ago, a fire went through some land that has belonged to my family for almost a hundred years. Recently, though, we had not been paying attention in one corner of the property and some young people secretly built a party shack, with a second-storey open deck. They were regularly going there to drink and have fires. They'd established a trail through the woods that indicates a lot of foot traffic. One of their fires caught the woods afire in a stiff wind, quickly burning past our property's border, along a thousand-foot streak downwind, literally to some home-owners' doorsteps. Luckily, no one was hurt and no houses were lost. Walking through the ashes, it's not hard to see some of the kids' broken and discarded bottles. But I've also been admiring how quickly Nature gets going again. Here are some blueberry shoots coming up through one of the broken bottles.

I have not noticed this kind of bee, almost brown, around here before.

While waiting for some nasturtiums to grow out and fill a flower pot left over from last year, I noticed this growing there. I had no idea what it was so I posted a picture of it to a local Wildflowers groups. Of course someone told me right away it is Marchantia, a well-known liverwort. I like it, so I've been keeping it protected the past couple of weeks. It's about three cm across now.