Pretty pictures: July roadside flowers, pink/orange

Took a back-roads route from Iowa City last Thursday, and found all these. Plus there's another post with more flowers coming up tomorrow Tuesday. As always, if you know the identity of the one NOID, let me know in comments.

All of these will be bigger, clearer, and more detailed if opened in a new window.

When I took this picture, I was pretty sure it was a Queen Anne's lace, Daucus carota. Then as I got to looking at it afterward, I was thinking that it seemed awfully full for Queen Anne's lace, and maybe it was some other, related plant. Now I'm kind of leaning toward the Daucus theory again, but I'm unsure. Open in a new window to see the odd insect sitting right in the middle of it all.

I've taken photos of fleabane (Erigeron sp.) before. It's not a big thrill, and this particular batch looks kinda ratty (it's been windy a lot lately) but I feel obliged to include it for the sake of completeness.

Hadn't ever really noticed these NOIDs before: they're pretty tiny, and the plants look like hell (which you can kind of see from the foliage I didn't crop out), but when you get up close enough, the flowers are very nearly attractive. Not quite, but very nearly.

I have yet to take a picture of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) flowers that didn't also include a ton of bugs as well. I think the common name should be changed to "pink orgyflower" or something similar. Interesting greenish, non-metallic bee in the top right.

I think this is a Rosa arkansana, prairie rose, in which case it is the official state flower of Iowa. If I'm wrong, then it's most likely a multiflora rose, Rosa multiflora, in which case it is a noxious invasive weed. Thorny son of a bitch either way.

Red clover, Trifolium pratense. I can't imagine any readers not knowing this plant, but I've led a sheltered and exclusively North American life thus far, so maybe they're news to someone. These are everywhere here, all the time. I also really like them.

Michigan lily, Lilium michiganense. We have orange daylilies all over the place here -- in some spots they're lining both sides of the road for a couple hundred feet. I remembered my grandmother having Michigan lilies along a slope to one side of her house, but was beginning to think I must have confused them with daylilies, because I'd never seen any around here that weren't obviously cultivated: I was pretty sure that hers hadn't been deliberately planted.

Now that I've seen this bunch, though, which was just sitting in the middle of nowhere along a road, with no house or other structure nearby, I feel a little more confident in saying that no, what she had really were Michigan lilies (which she called tiger lilies). 'Cause apparently they are around if you look for them. Just not to the same degree as the orange Hemerocallis.

Asclepias tuberosa. OMG guys I love these. We had had them at work last year, but sold out before any flowered, so I never got to see.

I've been noticing little flashes of orange low in the grass along Highway 218 for a couple weeks now, but of course we're always going by too fast to get a good look, so I wasn't sure what they were. The batch I finally took a picture of happened to be conveniently located near a gravel/highway intersection near Lone Tree, where we had to stop anyway.

Pretty picture: assorted blooming plants from work, Part 2 of 2

My camera is frustratingly unable to capture certain shades of purple accurately. The pictures may be crystal-clear and gorgeous, but all the red always gets sucked out of the purple. It's actually kind of a problem. Adding red with Irfanview doesn't help, because the red also gets added to everything else: it's no use getting the flower the right color if the clouds are pink and the leaves are yellow. It's frustrating, but I soldier bravely onward.

Daucus carota, Queen Anne's lace
There are some plants that people seem to love to hate. Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), or perhaps kudzu (Pueraria lobata), for example. Queen Anne's lace seems to be sort of the opposite: it's the plant people kind of hate to love. It's not particularly practical -- you can't really eat it or make baskets out of it or repel insects with it -- but it is, undeniably, pretty in that Julia set kind of fractally way, and that appears to be enough.

We don't actually sell this at work, but I felt the post needed another picture, so it got in. (I'm actually a little surprised we don't; it wouldn't be our first invasive plant, see next picture.)

Eichhornia crassipes
This one actually disturbs me a little bit. We do sell water hyacinth, despite the fact that it's a known invasive and is very disruptive in the ecosystems to which it's been introduced (via blocking light from deeper water, starving the water of oxygen, displacing native plants, and so forth). Granted that it wouldn't be invasive here, since it's not able to survive freezes (though I haven't seen it definitely stated that the seeds, which are plentiful, couldn't overwinter), but it's not like a fair amount of damage couldn't be done in a single season, too, under the right circumstances. On the other hand, the flowers are quite pretty. There's a weird peacock sort of quality to the top petal that intrigues me.

Angelonia 'Serena Purple'
I actively dislike Angelonia, for unfair reasons. Our entire stock (four or five different varieties) got a bad spider mite infestation toward the end of the spring and couldn't really be snapped out of it, so we had to throw it out. Or at least we wound up throwing most of it out; I think the plant in this picture is one that we managed to salvage. It's an attractive plant when it's healthy, but it goes downhill so fast.

Salvia nemorosa 'Marcus'
This one's nice. I'm not really a fan of any of the millions of different Salvia smells, but this one is less offensive than most, and the blooms are a genuinely pretty color, and seem to last for a long time. So it's not so bad.

Delphinium 'Purple Passion'
This is the most shameful example of the camera not giving me the right color when it comes to blues and purples. The real thing is both darker and redder. I've not actually spent much time dealing with, or noticing, the Delphiniums, until the last couple weeks, so I don't have much to add to that. I suppose I could say that I like the word. Delphinium. It's nice.