Friday Fabulous Flower - black cohosh & total flowering events for 2015

The waning days of October finally feel, and look, like fall having transitioned from summer like weather all in 30 days. Enough leaves have now fallen that the lawn is now hidden in many places, and in a couple of weeks we'll eagerly await the magic of leaf elves to clean them all up. TPP used to fight with a monstrous machine, a Billy Goat, to vacuum up leaves 8 cubic feet at a time, but all the lugging of the bags of leaves, not to mention the exertion of yanking on its pull starting motor a few dozen times, just got to be too much. Ah, well, the point here was to extol some spots of fall color, some fall flowering. The last flower standing this year, sort of a hellebore in seasonal reverse, was a black cohosh (or snakeroot) (Actea, formerly Cimicifuga, racemosa), funny family those buttercups. It was one genus when it was planted, now it's another and you would hardly notice any difference at all. This year it easily beat the wolfbane for last place not flowering until 20 October, and if our records are correct, and they always are, the addition of some new species combined with relatively few "did not flower" entries, helped our total number of perennial flowering events in the garden top out at 302, the first time the total was over 300. The Phactors are very pleased, but until the database if brought up to date, and the data entered for 2015, 2014, and 2013, it won't be official.