Tag: Ozark wildflowers

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Bad Weather News

Floods, tornadoes and such are definitely bad weather news. The pictures and stories about these are terrible.

In my corner of the Ozarks, these events are not happening. There is another, more silent disaster threatening.

Now, I am not a winter enthusiast. Snow is nice out the window from a warm room. Cold is to be avoided whenever possible.

That means our recent warm temperatures have felt nice. Walking and working outside without heavy coats on is great. Even in winter gardens need things done.

However, I would forgo this pleasure to stop the approaching ecological disaster.

Necessary Cold

Plants around here expect cold weather to last until March. They sit tight waiting for warm weather to announce the spring growing season. Warm weather like the last few weeks.

Greeting the New Year were wayside speedwell flowers spread across part of the yard. These bloom during any warm spell all winter.

Speedwell flowers not bad weather news
These Wayside Speedwell, Veronica polita, flowers may be small, but their summer sky look cheered up New Year’s Day this year. An international traveler, these are tough plants blooming when winter offers even a week of warm weather.

The daffodils and iris have started to grow over a month early. Both can take a lot of cold, but not common February temperatures.

Slippery elm trees are almost in bloom as are several maples, a month early. Flowers don’t survive really cold temperatures.

Many of the usual spring plants around the yard such as plantains, shepherd’s purse and white avens are looking like spring is coming soon. That does not bode well for the many spring ephemerals such as bloodroot and trillium.

Many plants are annuals. If they sprout now and get killed by cold before seeding, many will not come up again.

Trees with frozen flowers produce no fruit. Two of the last three years have seen few pawpaws for this reason.

Floods and tornadoes affect people as well as plants so these get bad weather news coverage. But the silent disaster of warm winter temperatures for weeks is bad too.

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GKP Writing News

Dent County Flora Books

I started taking wildflower pictures when I got my first digital camera. That was when I wrote Nature Notes for the Kaleidoscope, a local ad paper. These first morphed into “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and now are the basis for my Dent County Flora books.

Plants are interesting subjects to photograph. The best part is that they don’t disappear while I am setting my camera up. I can also get up close to most of them. (Water plants, stinging nettles etc. are given space.)

If you haven’t looked at plants much, you should. They come in a wide range of sizes, colors, scents and uses.

Plants are usually some shade of green. Indian Pipe, Pinesap and Coral Orchids aren’t green.

Wildflowers range from less than an eighth of an inch across to six inches around here. Some don’t have petals. Flowering dogwoods have white bracts (special leaves) with yellow green flowers in the center.

Dent County Flora books photograph of nodding spurge flower
Notice my finger tip compared to this flower. Many flowers are very small and difficult to photograph. There are two flowers in this picture. The white, four petal one is the male producing pollen. Below it is the green female with pistil sticking out. This plant is the Nodding Spurge, Euphorbia nutans, and will be in Dent County Whites.

Wanting to know what these plants were named, I needed several pictures of each. The flower, the back of the flower, the leaf, under the leaf, the stem, the fruit or seedpod and the plant adds up into a lot of photographs. And more than one of each thing is a good idea.

Every year I took more photographs and stored them. The stash got bigger and bigger, filling a 16GB key, then a second one. I hate having them sit unused.

An ulterior motive was an excuse to go hiking. This would add even more photographs to my stash.

A second motive was a challenge. How many kinds of plants could I find and identify? This had to be in my county as the goats keep me close to home.

Enter the Dent County Flora books. My list of plants found in Dent County has some 2000 plants on it. One book will not work. So there are the Dent County Blues, the Dent County Reds, the Dent County Whites, the Dent County Greens etc.

Will I ever find them all? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s enjoyable looking for the plants, getting the pictures and creating the pages of my Dent County Flora books.

I have assembled some pages from the Dent County Blues into a pdf found here.

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GKP Writing News

Completing Botany Pages

Completing botany pages for my Dent County Flora is challenging. You might ask: how hard could it be to take a picture of a flower and write a sentence about it?

That would be easy. That is not what I am doing.

One case in point would be the Wild Pink or Wherry’s Pink, Silene caroliniana. This is a lovely little spring ephemeral flower in vivid pink.

wild pinks for completing botany pages
At just over an inch across, the main way of seeing these little flowers is the vivid color, obviously the source of the common name. Wherry’s Wild Pinks bloom for only a week or two and each plant has many flowers on it.

The first step is to get pictures of the flower and plant. That assumes I’ve found the plant. I take a series of pictures including the plant, flower, side of the flower, the leaf, the stem and the fruit or seed pod.

Wherry’s Pink grows along one of my hills. I admire it every spring and take pictures of it every spring.

I sat down and began completing botany pages. There were the plant, flower, side of flower, leaf, stem pictures. And no seed pod.

A spring ephemeral plant grows quickly, blooms, sets seed and disappears. I’ve been trying to get that seed pod picture for two years now.

Last year I put up a marking flag by a group of plants. When I went back, other plants had grown over the remains of the Pinks. I couldn’t find them.

This year I found some other plants in a more open area. Lots of plants don’t like growing in the gravelly areas of the hill.

seed pos for Wherry's Wild Pinks
Like the plants, the Wherry’s Wild Pink seed pods are small, an inch or so long. As soon as these are formed, the plants start going dormant until the next year. Only luck and persistence gets a picture of these.

I went back and began to search. It is amazing how a plant can seem to disappear overnight. But I did find a couple with seed pods on them.

Now I can continue completing botany pages for Wherry’s Pinks. And for the wild peach trees as I went out to take pictures of the leaves. How I forgot to take a leaf picture, I don’t know, but I found I did last winter. Peaches are deciduous.

Once I have the pictures, choosing the ones to use, cropping, resizing and setting up the page can take an hour or more.

Maybe I should go back to writing my novel. That takes less time for each page.

I’ve walked the same hills for almost thirty years now. You would think this would get boring, but it doesn’t. Every week is different from the week before. There are always new things to see.

“My Ozark Home” was done on the twenty-fifth anniversay of my time here. It contains many of the things I saw over that time.

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Latest From High Reaches

Racing the Brushcutter

Roadsides are great places to find wildflowers to photograph. Many of these flowers are only found there. My problem is racing the brushcutter.

My county, and I’m sure it’s not alone in this, firmly believes roadsides should be like well-kept lawns. Wildflowers are not welcome.

Back in the 1960s there was an attempt to change this mindset by Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon Johnson. She promoted planting native wildflowers along the roads and had some success at the time.

Roadsides are the new prairies. Native wildflowers are killed off for grazing land, farm land and lawns everywhere else. Roadsides offer perfect conditions for many of these plants.

coreposis racing the brushcutter
Sunny yellow flowers of coreopsis dance along the roads until the brushcutter comes along. These are annuals and must set seed to grace the roadsides next year. Many wildflowers are annuals. After a few years, they disappear as they never get a chance to set seed.

Most plants do tend to get scraggly by the end of the growing season leaving behind clusters of brown stems. Cutting these down would be fine. The plants have bloomed and seeded by then.

Spring and summer are terrible times to mow these plants down. Many never recover. Many of those that do are ones most unwelcome such as poison ivy and sericea lespedeza.

I do a lot of walking along the roads near my house and check others on the drives to and from town. The other day one of these roads had the edge cut down to lawn height.

Panic.

I do know the brushcutter in passing. He and the road crew think I’m a bit crazy. Still, I stopped and marked a unique plant so he wouldn’t cut it down.

How do I mark all the plants I’m interested in? He would have to skip the whole road and won’t do that.

So, I am racing the brushcutter. Everyday I can I will be out walking the roads, stopping at all the areas with interesting plants, trying to get pictures before they are gone.

dogbance is racing the brushcutter and losing
Dogbane is a perennial. It will regrow next year. But this year’s flowers will be gone a will any seeds. Many perennials like milkweeds put up a single stalk each year. If it is cut, that year’s bloom is gone. And the pollinators like bees are left to starve as they can not live on grass.

Once he has gone by, all the lovely flowers will be gone. Oxeye daisies. Coreopsis. Sweet clovers (I photographed this the day before mowing.). Deptford pinks. The milkweeds, elderberry, daylilies, rose gentians getting ready to bloom. So many more.

After my wildflowers are gone, I will go back to walking the hills. Walking the roads is too sad.

Yellow sunflower type wildflowers are among the casualties. Read more about them in “Exploring the Ozark Hills“.

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Irises Are Blooming

Flower gardens are so pretty, but I don’t have time to do much. One solution is to put in perennials, so my irises are blooming.

Here in the Ozarks, irises have been a popular flower for decades or longer. Lots of them in a wide variety of colors got planted. Like flowers do, these set seeds.

The result is wild irises. Usually these are near some old home site or along roads.

In the guidebooks irises are listed under blue. Wild irises around here are usually pale yellow and smaller than the garden grown ones.

My irises are blooming in mostly blues and purples. Some are yellow. One is white. A friend was separating her irises and passed on the rhizomes to me, so the colors are whatever came. It doesn’t matter as all of them are lovely.

irises are blooming in the Ozarks
My irises are blooming. There is a patch of lovely lavender in one spot. A patch of white stands tall in the flower section of my garden. Yellow is starting to show. Along the road wild irises are blooming here and there. These are often not as big and partially hidden by the grass.

The hummingbirds visit the flowers several times a day. Perhaps they find a meal. Perhaps they pollinate the flowers. Later the flowers will leave behind a few seed pods.

So far, the daffodils, the surprise lilies and the day lilies are happily spreading around the yard and into the woods. Interestingly, the orange day lilies never set seeds, yet still spread all over along the roads. My yard day lilies were dug up by the road grader one year. Their patch has doubled in size in spite of being mowed both by the mower and by the deer.

Although wild irises could be considered an invasive species, they, like the daffodils and ox eye daisies, are here to stay. Therefore, I will stop along the road while the irises are blooming to complete the set of pictures of irises for my botany project.

After the irises are done blooming, the blackberry lilies will open. Like the irises and the daffodils, these escaped from home gardens probably a century ago. We are a country of immigrants.

“Exploring the Ozark Hills” has several Ozark wildflowers among its essays.