Pretty pictures: Yellow

Coldplay (the poor man's Radiohead!)¹ singing "Yellow" for your [optional] audio enjoyment

Heliopsis 'Ballerina.' It's hard for me to think of anything interesting to say about Heliopsis: it's behaved itself very nicely, but doesn't exactly stand out in the crowd, considering that the crowd is Rudbeckia and Gaillardia and Echinacea and so forth.

These next four pictures are all from Kent State Park, the confusingly-named state park west of Iowa City.

This one's my favorite Heliopsis picture from the park.

I tried looking up what species these might be, but -- there are about a million species in the genus, and I'm not 100% positive I got the genus right. I had no chance.

More Kent State Park photos will be showing up in the next couple weeks.

Solidago spp.² This plant is on my way to work; I happened to catch it when the blooms were about as fresh as they're ever going to get. I should ask somebody why we don't sell this.

I have pleasant childhood memories involving goldenrod: there was a ditch a block or two from our house that had goldenrod from the bottom of the ditch all the way up a smallish hill (maybe eight feet in all?), and I remember being impressed with it one afternoon when the sun was setting, how bright the color was. Also how much of it there was, and how many unusual bugs there were roaming around in it.

Rudbeckia hirta. Again.

The flower shop got in some Rudbeckia cultivars in pretty gigantic pots (12"? 14"?), which are stunning, though I doubt they're so stunning that we're going to get the price we're asking for them. I'm frequently surprised by such things, though.

Had I not been told, I wouldn't have guessed this to be a Rudbeckia. Neat, though.

Yet another roadside weed I've never seen before. It's weird to try to photograph, because the leaves mostly block the flowers -- it's obvious that there are flowers there, lots of them, but tough to get a clear picture through the leaves.

A somewhat better photo taken Monday at Kent State Park. The plants at the park were a little leggier; it was easier to get unobstructed pictures. I'm dying to find out what they are: it's another plant that I've only just begun to notice, after however many years of living here.

Begonia 'Mocca Yellow?' We never had very solid identification on these to begin with; the boss always just called them non-stop begonias, and that was good enough. They were never my favorite plant, or even in the top fifty: the flowers are very nice, as you can see, but there was mildew, and they were top-heavy, and several of them were overwatered and rotted out, and we still have a lot of them left over, which means they mostly didn't sell, either. (Customers seemed to like the orange and red ones better than the yellow and white.) So they didn't make the most favorable first impression on me, but I can see why they'd appeal.

I took St. John's Wort (Hypericum sp.) for a few years, a while back. I was never convinced either way about whether it was helping with the depression, and I'm still not sure but I lean toward no. Either way, I'm very proud of this picture. Open in a new window. It's cool.

NOID from Kent State Park. It seems familiar, but I can't place it for sure. Oenothera, maybe?
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¹ Something funny is that if you google "the poor man's radiohead," you get three pages of hits, about 80% of which refer to Coldplay. Fair? Probably not. I don't really see it, myself: aside from sharing an unnatural love of falsetto and lead singers with weird-but-nevertheless-frequently-attractive faces, how are they similar? I agree that Coldplay is (much) inferior, though I do kind of like "Viva la Vida."
Video's annoying, though. Hold still, Chris Martin! Just because you got a better haircut and clothing and no longer look like a twelve-year-old doesn't mean you get to lunge in my face and twitch around like a spaz. Have some dignity, man.
² I kinda narrowed it down to Solidago nemoralis, canadiensis, missouriensis, speciosa, rigida or ulmifolia, but there are hundreds of Solidagos and they all look kinda similar, so I'm not sure it's even necessarily one of those. I'm going mostly on the idea that those are the ones that are supposed to be native to Iowa.