Presque Isle County, Michigan, where I've been for the past eight days, is full of botanical eye candy. It is a botanist's Eden. I've got a lot of photos of interesting plants, and will try to put a few of them on here in the coming days. Below is a trio of my favorites, for starters.
Gorgeously blue and impossibly tiny, a pair of Dwarf Lake Iris,
Iris lacustris, nestles in a bed of Bearberry,
Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, foliage. The iris is locally abundant along the Lake Huron shoreline, and the Bearberry is nearly everywhere up here. A few clusters of the urnlike Bearberry flowers lurk in the backdrop.
Possibly a plant that only a botanist would love, or at least admire, is this Chestnut Sedge,
Carex castanea. Seen well, it is a handsome little plant, and is surrounded by eye-catching flora in the rocky ground in which it grows. The male, or staminate, flowers are at the plant's summit; the female flowers dangle on threadlike pedicels below. The entire affair is only six inches or so in height.
4 comments:
How has the weather been up there?
I opened your book Wild Ohio to find a location near Columbus that I've not been to and settled on Lawrence Woods for a Sunday day trip. According to another book about IBAs in OH, maybe I will finally see my nemesis bird, the Cerulean Warbler? Anyway, it looks like there will be a lot of nice wildflowers and other plants to enjoy there. Your enthusiasm for plants is infectious.
Nearly flawless but cool, LH. You'll love Lawrence Woods, Auralee, and I'm flattered that my book helped you find the place! Cerulean Warbler will be tough there; try Shawnee State Forest for a gimme Cerulean site.
This is cool!
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