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. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - large-flowered yellow foxglove

The large-flowered yellow foxglove (Aureolaria grandiflora) is a hemiparasitic plants; it's green and photosynthetic and it's also a parasite on surrounding plants.  This particular yellow foxglove likes to grow in open oak-hickory glades. A cluster of axes can stand 4 feet tall, and with flowers over 1.5" across, it's quite striking. We observed both bumblebees and hummingbirds visiting the flowers and they both might affect pollination. Yellow foxgloves have generated a lot of taxonomic confusion various ones having been placed in the genus Gerardia or Agalinus.  All of these genera used to be in the snapdragon family, but now are in the Orobanchaceae with the familiar parasitic plants, the Indian pipes.  In our herbarium, specimens of yellow foxglove were mis-identified, placed under the wrong genus, and generally generated a mess that TPP hopes he finally got straightened out.