Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: emerging

My front garden was where I first tried to grow poppies. I had a 5-year old packet of red poppies and thought, "These will NEVER sprout, but certainly not if I don't plant them!" So I walked outside and went to my small flower bed and promptly flung them all over the bed without care! I hoped that maybe a few would sprout. I was not prepared for what happened in the coming months. Instead of just a few, I think there must have been over 100 that sprouted and grew into a veritable WALL of red poppies!! Every morning I would come out and my jaw would drop at the incredible sight before me as new poppies opened! It was incredible. I fell madly in love with these flowers and watered them every day through our hot and unforgiving summer, and all the way until the first frost of winter killed the last of them. What a show! What a gift of beauty that continued month after month. If that weren't enough, the next spring, without any input by me, these flowers had reseeded themselves and put on ANOTHER show!! I added a mixture of poppies that year and soon the red ones were joined by a rainbow of lovely blossoms of different types of poppies. Even without care, they put on another show last year. Not a speck of water from me and still, these prolific flowers greeted me with another glorious springtime show! They didn't last as long, but still, I was happy to see them blooming until June! This picture is from May 2014, the year I had my raised bed garden, and here in my front garden I had irises and hyacinths and different kinds of allium (onion ), and others too. Seeing the poppies as the sun peeked over the hillside was a sight I relished, and I would be there with my camera to see the first rays of warm light shine through the crepe-like petals of these flowers I so adore.

Poppy blossoms grow inside an alien-looking pod that's covered with coarse hairs. As morning begins to stir and the sun's rays begin to shine across the land, mature pods crack open and soon fall away as the petals inside expand with the increasing warmth. Catching this event can be quite a challenge, but it's much easier when you have a garden overflowing with hundreds of flowers! I would leap out of bed each morning and stalk my flowerbeds, hunting for pods that were opening. Here is one that I captured in July 2013! Explored on January 25, 2014. Highest placement, #11.

8 more pictures in notes above! :) Hooray! Hooray!!! Sing to the high heavens, for Emerging Day has arrived!!! Miracles of all miracles, I can hardly believe my own two eyes!! I have had the distinct and awesome opportunity to successfully raise Clio Tiger Moths from eggs through all caterpillar stages, and through the month-long duration of their pupa stage as they transformed into adult moths, and now they are emerging in all of their incredible beauty for me to share with you!! The entire event from start to finish is simply AMAZING to me. I have never tried to raise caterpillars before, and I thought I might end up killing them all, but I have somehow managed to do a good job, as they are now hatching as adults, one by one, with wet and wrinkled wings. I find them after they wiggle out of their cocoons and sit still, slowly pumping blood into their wings to inflate and flatten them over the course of many hours as they dry. At night time I am releasing them onto the white railings on our back deck where they can sit safely camouflaged and when they are ready, they fly away into the night! Each will "overwinter", clinging to the bark of a tree until the springtime, when they will come out of their hibernation state and feed before mating and beginning the cycle all over again! Isn't it an amazing miracle?!! WOW!! I have a huge show to share tonight, with 7 different images of the moths and pupae about to hatch! I will make all of the images available for closer inspection but they will also be viewable here as insets on the picture above, which shows a newly emerged adult with rumpled wings! :) Elizabeth David CBE (born Elizabeth Gwynne; 26 December 1913 – 22 May 1992) was a British cookery writer who, in the mid-20th century, strongly influenced the revitalisation of the art of home cookery with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes. Wikipedia: Elizabeth David