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.
