Friday Fabulous Flower - Closed?

 

A friend once brought a picture of this plant to me and asked why don't the flowers ever open.  An interesting question surely.  TPP once studied a tropical flower that looked quite open but wasn't functional until it reclosed.  But this is called the bottle gentian, Gentiana andrewsii, and the flowers don't open any more than this.  It takes a big robust pollinator, like a bumblebee, to force its way into the flower, and in the process move some pollen around.  This is an interesting way for the plant to select a particular pollinator.  Sorry honey bee, you can't pollinate this native plant.  This can make a nice addition for fall, partial shade flowering.  Someone is bound to ask about when do the flower buds open.

Ah, September!

TPP likes this month.  The 2017 version is typically enough driving us crazy.  First, it was way too cool, although any time you don't need AC in the summer, we be happy.  Now, it is hot again, and combined with a typical enough drought, it is sort of an insult added to injury, here in late summer.  Listen, our new Pinus bungeana is calling for water.
Yes, we consider the first half of September to be late summer.  And as some of you know this means TPP has an anniversary celebration: fish soup, in lieu of a birthday, and this year it is sobering to note that this is the 35th fish soup.  So as usual TPP pays the air fare from Maine to the Midwest for some seafood.  This year the process was interrupted by a red tide recall on 10 pounds of mussels (dang dinoflagellates!) but the timely replacements were excellent, so were the clams, and a certain craving was satisfied for awhile at least.  That being said Mrs. Phactor's contributions, fresh Italian bread and apple pies were excellent as always.  No one goes home hungry.  Oh, TPP was home!
The gardens are bone, bone dry!  Trees are dropping leaves and ferns withering into drought induced dormancy, which is hopefully not permanent.  Newer plantings need attention. Trying to raise some late lettuce and bok choi, but keeping it watered is proving to be quite a chore.  Some bell weather plants have been watered 3 times since our last significant rain.  At  least the number of mosquitoes has declined to a tolerable level due to the dry.  Football has started and already Chi-town is playing for draft picks.  Baseball continues beyond all reason.  Play the world series already!  

Field work season at an end - finally

Today will be our last day of field work for this season. All of our plots have been harvested, so now it's time to gather in the PVC plot markers and taller bamboo stakes added to the poles to almost make them visible in the taller vegetation. Next spring the process will be started all over again by trying to find our plots. You see prairie fires make it impossible to leave anything combustable out there, and bits and pieces of field gear lost during the year will get the spring melt down. The permanent markers are actually spikes driven into the ground, permanent yes, but hard to see. Thank goodness for metal detectors. Nobody got shot by bow hunters and that's always a good thing. In some years the last of our field work has been done with snow flurries in the air; this year TPP is still picking pole beans in his garden! That's evidence of a very mild fall so far, but temps promise to be more seasonal now. Of course the lab is still filled with bags of vegetation to sort and dry, and here's hoping that gets done before the field trip to Costa Rica. Hmm, guess the field work isn't really over, it's just shifting to the lower latitudes.

Uncrowning trees

Oh, yes, it's that time of year when having lots of big trees makes for quite a bit of work because of their uncrowning (leaf fall).  Two really large sugar maples and two really large burr oaks are the primary leaf biomass producers, and today's image shows a sculptural bird bath that weighs a couple of tons catching the first of the maple leaves. The hardest part is to keep as many leaves as possible out of the lily pond. And still the drought persists, so some new trees and shrubs must be watered, and the bird bath filled, as the xeric conditions of winter approach. It also means that the fall color season will be brief because leaf fall should be fast given a bit of water stress all around. Good to see that some of the plants that were new last year handling this dry period pretty well meaning that they are now have well established root systems. If anything were still wilting before everything else it would indicate the opposite and be worrisome. Tomorrow will be the start of field work, so research will be competing with garden work, cut it is a nice time of year to be outside. Some graduate students are just now figuring out how much time they'll be spending during this data gathering stage. It'll eat their lunch. TPP will try to be a good guy and help out. 

Fall fell, so autumn

Today really felt like the first real autumn day, cool, crisp, dry (too dry!), and cool enough over night to require a light blanket with the optional two black kitty-girl warmer, but only for Mrs. Phactor. TPP is not complaining. He picked a handful of grape tomatoes and enough small eggplant for a pasta dinner. This also means it will soon be time to harvest prairie biomass for another master's degree project, but that will probably be done next week. Time to go looking for some prairie gentians; although vividly blue they hide deep within the grassy canopy and so are seldom seen by most people. A bottle gentian grew in our gardens for a few years, but it did not sustain itself. It's a strange plant whose flowers never actually open requiring fairly substantial bees to force their way in. Now TPP is on the prowl for a couple of big, winter squashes, they type with hard, dark orange flesh.  They are around but right now shops want "Halloween" prices for them, not squash prices, so perhaps some will wait for a post October sale. Of course there may also be enough squash remaining in the freezer from last year. Inventory control is so hard, and it's a form of spelunking to find out what frozen items lurk in the depths of the freezer. Mrs. Phactor already pointed out that at least 5 packages of Andouille sausage await the urge to make some gumbo.  And cool fall weather is perfect for a pot of gumbo!  See how things just sort of work out especially as the transition continues from margarita season to NY cocktail season. 

A visit from the leaf elves

For those of you who may not know, the Phactors' estate has something like a dozen very large deciduous trees, and this means that our lawns and gardens get buried, deeply, in leaves. Enough leaves that senior citizens don't consider raking them for even a nanosecond. In addition to the raking, dragging heavy tarps loaded with leaves to the curb, when the curb can be 300 feet away, is nothing to be undertaken lightly even though our gardens are both our hobby and exercise program. This is one of those times of year when TPP resents the spandex clad harlequins who jog by, accomplishing nothing but health. So several years ago TPP resorted to renting the Billy Goat, a massive leaf vacuum that sucks up and shreds up to 8 cubic feet of leaves, a not inconsiderable mass to drag away and empty. The problem here is that the recoil starter required a football lineman to repeatedly pull the cord, and with as many leaves as there are, that was a lot of starts. And all that for $80 rental. So, Mrs. Phactor discovered among her clients a fellow who employs leaf elves who visit during the day, when no one is around, and all the leaves disappear! So neat, so clean, and all those leaves piled up so neatly! And elves only cost $50 more than the Billy Goat! OK, you have to leave out some milk and cookies, but that's a small price to pay for not aggravating and old "tennis elbow" injury (no, TPP doesn't play tennis; it was a field trip injury). There was a lot of anticipation because you are never completely sure when the elves may visit. So our excitement is quite genuine. And those clean lawns and gardens, now the envy of the neighborhood, are a terrific gift every year. 

First it snowed, then it leafed

Our area got about an inch of snow last evening, the first of the winter, and not so unusual for November 12.  And then the temperature dropped to 19 F (-7 C) over night. Again nothing so unusual for this time of year.  But the fall has been lingering and late, so this is rather sudden cold and a hard freeze.  TPP decided that the gardening season was over and harvested the last of the bok choi and moved a couple of small boxes of parsley indoors.  Several of our trees really never did change color, and they were holding fast to their leaves.  Only the sugar maples had really dropped most of their leaves.  But this morning if leafed.  To explain, TPP's book editor is big on parallel construction, so "snowed" "leafed"; that's parallel right?  All those leaves that were hanging on literally dropped all at once.  It was leafing hard on the back half of the estate this morning and it was kind of magical and sort of pretty; if you had stood there with a basket it would have filled pretty quickly.  It was quite a sight except for all the leaves falling into the lily pond.  A sudden leaf drop usually this happens with ginkgo trees, but these other trees not so much.  Now there's a leaf-snow-leaf sandwich on the ground that's 3-5 inches thick.  Raking season has officially begun. 

Standard cat time

It's funny what difference an hour makes and even the 1 hour day-light-savings time/standard time shift causes some discomfort and disorientation.  Resetting all the time pieces in the house, not to mention the car, is quite a bother; there are more than you realize. Then you have to remember the "fall back" "spring forward" helper or you end up 2 hours off.  This isn't all that hard, but in our household there are two fixtures that do not reset so easily, two black cats although the color probably doesn't matter. They have no buttons or stems to twiddle (yes one clock still has a stem to reset the hands (Hands!?)).  The kitty girls have a very accurate tummy alarm that only gets turned off by pouring in kibble. So it really doesn't matter when the time is reset because the kitty girls don't reset so quickly; it takes a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, inquiring paws poke at your face to find out why you are so very, very late with something so very, very important as feeding time. 

Suddenly deciduous

Last night it froze; the low temperature was 25 F.  Up until now only the lightest of frosts had happended, so lots of trees still have green leaves.  Under these circumstances a number of tree species will drop their leaves all at once including hackberry and black walnut, and most definitely ginkgo.  What causes tree leaves to drop is an abcission layer, an anatomically weak zone that forms in the fall at the base of the leaf stalk.  Trees like ginkgo still hang on to their leaves until a freeze, and then, perhaps as a result of ice crystal formation, the weak connection is broken and as the temperature goes up a few degrees, all the leaves fall at once.  TPP sort of wishes other trees did the same because then you'd be done with it, but some of our big trees hang on to leaves so tenaciously you end up raking in the spring.  The areas under the suddenly deciduous trees were just a carpet of dropped leaves this morning, and most people won't even notice. And leaves were still falling like rain.  Most other trees drop leaves more gradually as the abcission zone matures.  All trees drop leaves, but when they drop them all seasonally, they are deciduous.  Otherwise they are evergreen, which is not synonymous with conifers because some are deciduous.

Not yet fall addendum - chiggers

TPP's musings about how things do not yet seem like fall although it is October 12th added another dimension.  Yes, there are two nasty, itchy chigger bites on his foot as just one more reminder that nature just doesn't yet seem to be one with the idea that it's fall.  On the other hand, TPP collected some seed of a hemiparasitic yellow foxglove, and the maturity of those fruits and seeds is right on time.  Some things just aren't influenced all that much by changes in the weather. 

Sounds of fall? Feels like fall? Something is crazy.

Yesterday evening, after a long day, TPP was sitting out on his patio sipping a margarita while checking email on his laptop.  It was quite pleasant outside in the dwindling twilight.  A stroll around the gardens found a nice pale yellow water lily in bloom.  The gardens are still quite green especially having gotten a decent watering.  And how pleasant to be listening to the cicadas singing.  And then you stop an think, it's the 11th of October.  Waterlilies and cicadas should have come and gone.  That waterlily first bloomed on May 30th, and now it still has an open flower on October 12th.  That's some flowering season.  The only other perennial to come close was the Missouri evening primrose, but it stopped flowering about 2 weeks ago.  Now TPP asks you in what world are you able to sit on your patio drinking a margarita, listening to cicadas, and looking at waterlilies in mid-October?  Well, the answer is a world experiencing a warming climate and where the seasons of warm-loving things like margaritas are expanding. So this is more like mid-September than mid-October, and what with April being more like May, you are getting the idea. It just doesn't seem like fall, yet.

Timing is everything - household jobs edition

September is always a schizophrenic weather month, in like summer, out like fall, and here in the Midwest the changeover can be sudden.  Last week you needed the ceiling fan on one night, and the next night it was 45F and you had a cat snuggling in bed with you.  Except for late August and early September temperatures around here were pretty reasonable this year, so reasonable there was little need of the AC.  As a result TPP got the window screens installed on the south end of the sun room, and then a distraction occurred of some nature, so he never got the screens in the north windows, although there is a screen door there.  So for 3.5 months those two window screens have leaned against the wall a testament to procrastination and distraction.  Each time TPP spied them launched a very brief self-recrimination that was quickly squelched by good mental health, and then forgotten until the next time they were noticed.  Now comes the realization that it didn't matter. The screens now can be returned to the garage attic until next summer, a quite happy thought, and then brought out again with all the best intentions.  The sun room needs to be warmed up because several tropical plants want to come inside; 45F is a temperature they don't like.  Although it doesn't damage them, some of them metabolically shut down for a spell.  The bonsai figs are very tough plants and don't seem to mind a bit so they can stay outside for a bit longer. 

Uh oh! Honey dew weekend!

This is not a good sign.  Mrs. Phactor is on the patio and the table is covered with various bags and boxes of bulbs.  In the spring bulbs are great; in the fall they make my back ache because they need to be planted.  The first couple of hundred go OK, but then it gets to be work.  A 3-year plan to eradicate lily of the valley under a big burr oak and plant a sward of English bluebells is in it's final year.  This will be a tiny version of the planting in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden that inspired this action, fall out of Botanical Geek Tour #1.  So if TPP spends too long with this blog things will begin to get ugly.  Last weekend the monsterous elephant ears by the pond were dug, and now it looks funny because those huge leaves, over 6 foot tall, made such a presence, now some new perennials will be planted.  A bed of tall, purple leafed cannas must be dug so a couple of hundred tulip bulbs can be planted.  While the weather has been very much fallish for three weeks now, cool at night, flirting with frost but not quite getting there, so the cannas still stand tall, so that means some massive rhizomes are anchoring the whole bed.  At any rate somewhere there's a shovel with my name on it.  And come spring, today's work will look wonderful.  And mocking me from the adjacent kitchen chair, one of the kittygirls is looking quite smuggly comfortable. Unfortunately the weather is iffy and rain threatens to change our plans.  So if it rains Mrs. Phactor will probably want to go and buy more bulbs. 

Fall - When deciduous is a dirty word

Gardening is our exercise program, and this is not a complaint, but just about now deciduous becomes a very dirty word about this time of year. Big trees, and several in excess of 4 feet dbh grace our gardens, and big trees drop lots of leaves, so even for those of us who are not overly fussy about what constitutes a lawn have a simple choice, remove the leaves or watch your yard revert to a woodland, quickly. Actually in many parts of our yard, spring beauty, bluebells, trillium, and wild ginger grow willy-nilly here and there, and parts of our yard are dedicated to spring ephemerals and a woodland landscape, so you end up drawing a line somewhere. A garden service already removed a great many leaves when we were too busy to do so, and today the Phactors spent their day removing a second accumulation of no small proportions, and the oaks and hackberries (yes, more than one) have yet to give up the majority of their crowns, so another accumulation is in the offing. If left until all the leaves were down, the accumulation would be inches deep in many places, so perhaps letting it revert to woodland is not such a bad idea, but the gardens look so nice across a green sward. So we got our exercise today. Now leave us alone!

Cat Seasonal Unemployment Disorder

The two felines who possess our manse are quite pleased that the operations managers they employ to provide essential services keep the windows open as much as possible so that they may use their valuable time to survey the bird and squirrel populations and generally watch the world go by. This occupation having occupied so much of their time for these past few months is now in jeopardy as the sudden turn to cooler temperatures has forced the closing of the windows, sorry, observation posts. In particular this is weighing heavy upon the junior partner as this is her first bout with seasonal unemployment, and so she moves from window to window expressing her displeasure with the entire manner in which this place is being run in a manner entirely consistent with a sense of entitlement that rivals that of the American teenager. She fails to recognize that her long dense fur is adapted to high latitude seasonality while us natives of the tropics and nearly hairless ape-descended life forms are not so well equipped. But they do both like having blankets upon the beds, and the shift to napping as a primary activity will not take too much adjustment.