Friday Fabulous Flower - Finally, a Sunflower sort of

The screwy weather of 2017 has some of TPP's plants confused. June was quite hot, July & August were cooler and wetter, September started cool but then got hot and very dry. And as Fall continued and the days shortened, the weather got cooler and rains finally relieved the drought.  But no cold weather even into early October (except for the last 24 hrs). so some plants are a bit confused about what time of year it is.  Today's sunflower, or more usually a rock rose, an ornamental variety generally placed in the species Helianthemum nummularium, a member of the Cistaceae.  The genus means sun flower, but so does Helianthus.  Members of this family, and this genus, and this species are pretty common ornamentals of the Mediterranean region, but most of them are not hardy here in zone 5.  It's a small, low, evergreen shrub that makes a nice border and ground cover.  After looking sort of rough most of the early summer and not flowering then (perhaps recovering from winter), one of two plants decided to flower now!  Pretty bright flower, but not a big display.  Nice in a  protected area. 
Busy weekend has put TPP behind.  

Friday Fabulous Flowers - SYCs

As any good field botanist knows SYCs are the birder's equivalent of LBJs (little brown jobs).  SYC stands for Stinking Yellow Composites, composites being the old irregular name for the Aster family, plants with daisy-like, dandelion-like inflorescences, which many people wrongly take as single flowers.  In the late summer and fall lots of them come into flower, especially on the prairie, and they are largely yellow.  Not the easiest group of plants to sort out accurately even for us professionals.  Here are three that TPP collected yesterday on a local prairie and with no more than 3 hours of effort using field guides, online resource, and the Flora of North America, three reasonable like 85% positive identifications were made.  All three SYCs are in the genus Helianthus, sunflowers as the name says. The trick is, which species?  At this point they would be H. grosseserratus, the sawtoothed sunflower, H. pauciflorus, the stiff sunflower, and H. tuberosus, the Jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke, which is native, no matter what the name suggest (top to bottom). The goldenrods collected at the same time were even harder.
In the bottom image you can see the ray flowers around the outside looking like petals. In the center, making the button or disk, are star-shaped flowers, all these small flowers arranged to present the image to pollinators of a big flower.