Flower Shapes

I love to look at shapes in nature. This one.. Indian Heliotrope or Turnsole (heliotropium indicum) I believe... doesn't it remind you of an octopus' tentacle?

Heart-shaped, bell-shaped, metaphor of form. 
Is it symmetry or silhouette,
A reminder of shapes of the past,
Connection, categorization,
Or simply individual expression of beauty?

More Spring Edibles

THE woodlands behind our house erupt into a marvellous sea of blue just about now. We had to look up what the flower is: Dame's Rocket. More exciting - it's edible! It's actually considered invasive, though hard to believe, as it looks so beautiful brightening up the woods. Only the petals should be eaten and we tried them in a salad. The flowers also pressed nicely and we look forward to using them for crafts when they are fully dried.

First Foraging of the Year

TODAY we harvested from our garden - and we haven't even planted our vegetable garden yet! The plants we harvested are often called weeds, which, as 'plants growing in an undesirable place' (i.e. the flower bed) they were to us too. 'Undesirable plants,' however, they were not.

Yellow wood sorrel has compound leaves divided into three parts, each shaped like a heart. In England it's also known as cuckoo sorrel, because its small yellow flowers bloom when the cuckoo sings. The delicate leaves close at night and supposedly when it's about to rain too. Most of all they have a delicious lemon flavour and are great for snacking.

Chickweed is one of the most common edible 'weeds' and has a tiny white star-shaped flower. The leaves and flower buds are hairy. It's very nutritious and a good addition to salad.

And today we found some tiny shoots of pokeweed! See here for previous adventures with this leafy green vegetable. I have to admit this is more fun to harvest than to boil twice, but somehow it is reassuring to know that we can eat from the garden/the wild just by knowing what to look for. However far so many "foods" in the supermarket are from their original state, it is still possible to eat the healthy way of our ancestors. Providing, of course, your backyard is not sprayed with pesticides :-)

Photo credit: www.all-creatures.org and Emily Porter

Spring Scents

EVERY spring our whole back garden is imbued with an incredible scent. It took me a while to figure out it comes from a huge holly bush right at the back of the garden. Holly is typically thought of during the winter months, particularly around Christmas, but the splendour of its blooms and their fragrance also make quite a spring statement. Holly is a dioecious plant, meaning each plant is either male or female. Only the females bear berries, and only when a male plant is located within about 30'.

This tree of ours is male, its flowers having the honour of pollinating several female holly bushes elsewhere in the garden so that they may develop the familiar red berries. The clusters of tiny white flowers grow along the branches, their scent attracting bees and winged creatures of every kind, who are all too eager to buzz to the next holly and deposit a dusting of pollen.

Some more holly facts:
-There are more than 400 species of holly
-If not pruned, some species can grow as tall as 60'
-Berries range from red to black and yellow in different species
-Berries are mildly poisonous to humans, but have been used medicinally for many years
-The tea Yerba Mate is made from a type of holly

Velcro Trees

A lesson in seed dispersal disguised itself as a fun game of lobbing sticky seeds at each other followed by trying to take branches of it home. The cocklebur seed is covered in long hooked spines which stick to fur, hair and many fabrics. We experimented with all different parts of our clothing to see which it stuck best to, and woolly fabrics were the clear winners. Then, as we each took a branch in hand to take home and ended up with bare twigs by the time we arrived at the car, we discovered how easily the seed is knocked off the branch.

We concluded that the cocklebur is a very accomplished hitchhiker. Supposedly it also boasts the honour of being the inspiration behind Velcro.

Tree Fruit Game

WE were out on a walk during Thanksgiving weekend in the mountains and came across many fallen tree fruits, the size of tennis balls. A few still hung on trees without their leaves - a curious sight -but most lay on the ground. We collected some and discovered that despite their size and weight, they float. They were useful too - when thrown from a small bridge into the stream below, they became perfect puppy-fetch-fodder, over and over again. Turns out they were Osage Orange, or Hedge Apple. Some interesting facts:

• The fruits are often kept for 2-3 months indoors, where they act as an insect repellent
• The hard bark was often used to make bows and arrows by Native Americans, and is considered exceptionally good wood for instrument making
• The orange root can be used to make yellow dye.

Swamp Hibiscus

LAST year I acquired a swamp hibiscus. Only after I got it home, did I read the label and see that it needs a damp environment. No way would this survive in our dry garden!

So imagine my surprise when the plant not only thrived, but we found a bud on it. Then a few days later, a glorious red bloom! The plant has since flowered three times, each time lasting only two days, but so beautiful!

The Mulberry Bush

WHAT a surprise to discover that there is really such thing as a mulberry bush. And there was me thinking it was just a song! The discovery began at the farmer's market where we noticed a bag of strange looking dried fruits. They were indeed mulberries, and very tasty they were too.

Then, we found a mulberry tree! There are two species in the US - red mulberry and white mulberry. The red mulberry actually turns almost black when ripe and looks like a small, elongated blackberry. None were ripe when we found them, but we plan to go back soon.

What's Blooming Now?

OUR garden is exploding into colour and buzzing with flying creatures of every kind! The white dogwoods are at their peak; purple wisteria drapes from the tallest trees and an unidentified large shrub has the most beautiful and fragrant creamy white blossoms. A few rockery flowers are peeking out tentatively, the azaleas are budding and just waiting for a few more warm days to burst into bright pink and the aliums we planted in the autumn are getting ready to make their first appearance.

Alexander is very into smelling flowers right now. This photo is from the orchid house at the Botanical Gardens.

The Red Stuff

ON a tip that the red stuff is now blooming at Arabia Mountain, we took a trip there to see. This is one of Georgia's many granite outcrops, and plants and animals here are often very specialized due to the stressful environment. It was quite an amazing sight! Great expanses of seemingly dead grey rock interspersed with explosions of colour and - after the night's rain - rivulets of water, sparkling in the sun. There were yellow, purple and white flowers, and great carpets of this strange red stuff.

Diamorpha grows in the shallow, sandy soil of depressions in the rock known as solution pits. Really shallow soil - as in about one inch. It's a succulent, like a cactus. It has adapted to heat and periods of drought through several strategies, such as storing water in thickened leaves, and its red colour which protects it against radiation from the sun, and can survive due to the lack of competition.

Certainly a very unusual landscape.

Catching Interest

THE other evening Thomas came into the house from the backyard and made me go out into the woods behind the garden to show me what he found. It was worth the trip! Though the sun had gone down by the time I got there, I could see a carpet of purple throughout the woods. Almost more impressive than the flower was the discoverer - looks like my interest for nature is a little infectious... I have yet to identify this flower, so please let me know if you are familiar with it.

In the Weeds

THE first mowing of the season is long overdue in our front garden. I was thinking it looked a little shaggy, then shamefully unkempt until this week, when a purple-flowered weed popped into bloom all across the lawn, which looks quite lovely. Now, after spending two hours lying in the 'meadow' examining the different kinds of non-grass and watching the bugs, I rather wish we could keep it long.

What makes a weed a weed? A close look at some of the flowering kinds revealed some pretty little flowers, no less attractive than some you would pay for. The bees certainly make no such arbitrary distinction. They buzzed by the dozen around the purple henbit, oblivious to our presence. Henbit has an interesting shape: it has square stems and the upper leaves fan out, appearing to encircle the entire stem like a wax catcher on a candle.

I was surprised to find a delicate yellow flower on another weed whose leaves I have seen often. This turned out to be sorrel. Native Americans have used different varieties of this plant in different ways: chewing the leaves to alleviate thirst, feeding its crushed bulbs to their horses to enhance their speed, and boiling the plant to make a yellowish-orange dye.

We have no daisies to make chains from nor buttercups to shine under your chin to see if you like butter, like I did as a child. But we found other things to do. We dug up wild onions to look at the bulb and smell the crushed leaves, blew dandelion clocks, watched ladybirds climb up waving stems, gently pushed back leaves to see glittery slug trails and watched ants weave their way around their leafy cities. Emma dug a hole and buried her hand. She noticed how cool it was in the ground, and concluded that roots must prefer cool places and flowers warm places.

"A weed is but an unloved flower."

~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Nature's Tree Ornaments

Sweetgum seed pods hanging in our garden at dusk.

Bark is Beautiful

NOTHING smells sweeter than the outdoors just after a rain. Checking out a new spot, we discovered the small but charming in-town wood called Blue Heron Nature Preserve.

With a joyously shrieking three-year-old, fussy baby and bounding dog obliterating any chance of wildlife encounters, our attention was drawn to the trees and especially their bark. When competing with leaves, fruits and seeds, the poor old bark usually loses out. But when the showier portions of the tree have succumbed to winter's plan, it is the tree's outer layer whose turn it is to shine. If you, like I, have never noticed such diversity in tree bark, now is the time to get out there and take a look.

We noted rough, scaly pines and smooth, pale beech trees on one side of the creek. The pines told us from which direction the rain had come as that side of the tree was dark, almost black. On the other side, the tree landscape was a little different. Emma was intrigued by the peeling papery birch bark, which I admitted to using as fire kindling in my far off DofE (Duke of Edinburgh Award) expedition days. Then we came across a number of sycamores, even more interesting. Sycamore bark has patches of brown, green, grey and tan that are randomly put together in a camouflage-like pattern. The darker outer layers can be peeled off to reveal new growth beneath, which is a yellow-white colour.

As we stopped for a snack, we noticed hidden under a fence the unmistakeable shoots of daffodils. At the beginning of January?? And still people don't believe global warming is a problem.

English Holly

EN route to a park on foot, we spotted many holly bushes and trees. In residential gardens, in vacant spaces, in the woods, we noticed that of the 50-odd instances of holly we passed, only a single bush bore berries. This of course led our inquisitive minds to wonder why. Here is some of what we discovered:

* Although mature in late autumn, the berries are very bitter so are rarely touched by birds until late winter after frost has made them softer and more palatable. So maybe it wasn't cold enough...? Our hats, scarves and gloves indicated that this was unlikely.
* Hollies are dioecious. To the non-botanists among us, this means that you need both a male and a female plant for reproduction to work. So the berryless plants we saw could have been all male, or all female with no male in the vicinity to pollinate them.
* A poor show of berries can also be due to cold winds and wet periods during flowering, which deter insects from pollinating the plants. (Wind and rain in England? How could that be?)
* Of course, the birds could just be really hungry.

Whatever the cause, I was relieved to see plenty of berries on another walk, so all is not lost.

Scarecrows In The Garden

THE Atlanta Botanical Gardens holds an annual festival of scarecrows, which sounded like a good place to visit on a beautiful Autumn day.

Sponsored by various companies and organisations, the scarecrow installations were scattered throughout the gardens. Whether constructed all from a particular material, depicting a scene, serving as a means of outreach or merely a witty statement, the designs and their accompanying titles were nothing if not imaginative.

Just as appealing as the exhibition however were the permanent residents of the gardens and incidental visitors from the animal world. In the waterfall pond, snapping turtles swam beneath draping tropical plants, while outside enormous bullfrogs basked in the sun. We also spotted a tiny gecko and a hummingbird, which thankfully were interesting enough to stop a preschool meltdown in its tracks.

Pop quiz: What's the difference between frogs and toads?

Generally frogs spend most of their lives in or near water. Toads on the other hand, get out on land a little more and find their way into gardens and yards. Frogs also usually have moist slimy skin, while toads have dry bumpy skin. (From www.sciencebob.com)

In the Shade

THE next time we have children over, I think we shall have a competition to see who can collect the most pinecones and sweetgum fruits. Emma has an ongoing collection of green and brown sweetgums "for the squirrels" nestled in the roots of the tree. This got me thinking that I didn't actually know what most of the trees are in and behind our garden, besides the numerous pine trees, American holly, flowering white dogwoods and one sweetgum.

So with the help of this website I made a start at identification:
Sweetgum - liquidambar styraciflua
American holly - ilex opaca
Black tupelo (black gum) - nyssa sylvatica
Water oak - quercus nigra