Pretty pictures: Pinkish Red

Pressed for time again -- we were elsewhere for a good chunk of yesterday.

Most of these were taken at the ex-job; the rose was at Lowe's.

Dianthus NOID. I should know what the variety is: it's the same thing we sold during the two springs I worked there. I just forgot, and there's no time to try to look for the ID.

Lamprocapnos x 'King of Hearts.' I regret not getting a clearer photo of the foliage on this one; it seemed different. Not that I'm hugely familiar with bleeding-heart foliage.

NOID Cattleya alliance orchid.

Paeonia 'Hoki.' ('Tis the season.)

Cyclamen persicum NOID. If anybody still remembers my Cyclamen experiment from last fall: it looked worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and then I moved it to the (cool, humid) basement under shop lights, and it's doing massively better. Among other things, it's growing HUGE leaves. Which I guess is good. I was getting sick of it and considering throwing it out, so it's shaping up just in time, pretty much.

Rosa 'Radtko' (doubled knock-out rose). I'm sure there are roses out there that I could find interesting and exciting, but I haven't run into them at Lowe's. Not that I expected to. I'm just saying.

Dianthus NOID. Dianthus were one of my favorites to sell, at the ex-job; they smelled nice, and I enjoyed deadheading them. I'm not currently growing any, and probably won't in the near future, because we're still working on establishing a raised bed in the backyard, and even if we had a bed already I maybe still wouldn't grow any because I don't know if I'd want to, but they were nice, occupationally speaking.

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: Rosa NOID miniature

Valentine's Day again. I tried really really hard to come up with something cool and original to post here (the picture, at least, is new), but, you know, massive fail. So here's a repost, which I normally don't do and feel really bad about. It's at least maybe more financially relevant than it was last year:


Buy more stock in roses
Millionaires will always woo
Don't be shocked if roses
Make a millionaire of you

-"Roses," by Magnetic Fields (Stephin Merritt),
on the CD 69 Love Songs Vol. 2

Personalish: 12 October 2002

Six years ago on this date, the husband and I had been dating for maybe five or six weeks. And I liked him enormously, but due to some bad past experiences I was trying very hard not to use the L-word (no, not "lesbian." The other L-word.), reasoning that this time, before declaring my undying affection, it might be good to get to know him a bit. So, dating. Also we had some very different upbringings and very different understandings of how the world worked: he was astrology, I was astronomy; he was born of transcendental-meditating hippies, I was born of born-again glossolaliacs; he was studying religion, I had a degree in chemistry. So there were some reservations about how well that was going to work out.

And then he won a radio call-in contest and got two free tickets to a Cowboy Junkies concert in Des Moines. Which, the Cowboy Junkies' cover of "Sweet Jane" had somehow become "our song" at some point, because I had been making a habit of bringing him white roses when I visited his place (white because, again, not wanting to be pushy, not wanting to push too far ahead of where we actually were), and the song mentions white roses, and we thought the song mentions white roses but apparently it doesn't (see comments), but even if it hadn't been a special song to us, I really liked the Cowboy Junkies (having an instinctive love of all things Canadian: Canadian citizenship committees, take note!) and would have gone anyway. So we went.


And you know, I don't actually remember the night all that well. I mean, I wrote it down in my journal: I could look it up. But I mainly remember two things. One, there was a moment before we got to the concert where I was absolutely positive that he was going to crash the car and we were both going to die. Neither of those things actually happened, but there was some abrupt braking on the interstate and that was scary. And the other thing was that after the concert, after the drive back, I realized that, whether I liked it or not, this was not all just me wanting to be in love, that I actually was in love, and I was at some point going to have to say so. Chances were going to have to be taken. I didn't say so that night; I'm not sure when it was. But I knew as of 12 October 2002 that this was going to be something.

Consequently, though we do celebrate the night we met (24 August 2002) as our "official" "anniversary," the more meaningful date to me is 12 October.

Pretty picture: assorted blooming plants from work, Part 1 of 2

Begonia NOID.
We have more interesting Begonias than this, but this is the one I got a picture of. People don't really seem to care for it, and I can't say as I blame them. The ones at work are only now, two months after people would maybe have bought them, starting to look presentable. Not so much fashionably late to the party as showing up to the party at the wrong location, the day after it was held. We will have to propagate earlier next year.

Rosa x 'Radrazz'
I haven't taken any pictures of the roses at work before this, mostly because the roses are the domain of the nursery lot, not the greenhouse, and so I don't normally have much of a valid, work-related excuse for being among them. (Same thing for the trees and shrubs, actually: we do have them, I'm just never around them.) Also I just kind of don't get what the big deal is (please don't hate me, Niels): as far as I can tell, they're just one more flowering plant, one that gets sick a lot. I used to like the cut flowers, too, until I read Flower Confidential (I'm still intending to do that review someday.); now I'm a little uneasy about them. I'm willing to be educated on why roses are the best plants ever, if anybody wants to: it's clear that there must be a lot of people who think this.

Lobelia cardinalis.
The color is even more eye-searingly red in person. It's hard for me to see this, which is surely among the reddest red I've ever experienced, as being related to L. erinus, which is just about the bluest blue. But apparently they are related, and there are other plants in the genus that they resemble even less than they resemble one another. Lobelia is just a varied genus, I guess.

Zinnia 'Profusion Fire'
All the Zinnias were sold a long time ago; this is from a planter that the nursery lot put together to decorate the lot with. (It's probably technically for sale: pretty much everything is for sale. The boss would sell the floor if someone made a good enough offer. There is, however, no marked price on the planter, so if someone were to ask we'd have to make up a number on the spot.)

Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm'
My way of renouncing the comment I made earlier about not liking black-eyed susans. They're okay. I'm a little confused about what the difference is between 'Goldsturm' and the plants I see growing along the sides of the road here. There's nothing that jumps out at me to say this plant is clearly better than those plants, yet it's a cultivar and those are not. Why?