Weekly Walk July 22 2009

As the puppy dragged me about the farm, I managed to snap a few pictures this week. And do a lot of stumbling….er….jogging too!

I think this is also a type of Vetch, it grows everywhere all over the farm, intertwining with everything around it. The patterns of the leaves and the stems are so elegant when you look up close, but from farther away it is just a tangled blob and has no real impact because the flowers are so small.

 

 

 If you get wounded while lost in the counbtryside, you can cover the wound with a burdock leaf and then use the long stems of the vetch to bind the leaf to you.

 

 

 

 The Joe Pye Weed has formed a big patch, although it is hard to get too close to it and take some photos. Hmm, maybe I need a new lens…

 

       I planted a Clematis Tangutica about 4 or 5 years ago, and for the first time, there are some flowers! I am thrilled, and hoping that next year it might even grow up the side of the little garden shed it is beside.

An Ontario wildflower I am quite fond of is the Queen Anne’s Lace. It fills the roadsides and fields, and can be quite beautiful when viewed up close although in Ontario we seem to take it completely for granted.  It really does remind you of lace!  Sometimes the buds are tinged with a pink blush but they lose this as they open and become snow white. They are generally about 2 inches in diameter, but sometimes they can reach 6 inches across! The one I photographed here was about 4 inches wide, so quite large. Please don’t take my word for it alone, but someone told me you can eat the roots if you are lost in the wilds.

 
At the end of the day of my walk, I saw a bat flitting about in the sky with the moon as a backdrop and couldn’t resist trying to capture his picture.

Plant Lady

“Weekly” Walk July 15 2009

While my attention has been on the new puppy, things have exploded into bloom here at the farm! I missed photographing the Catalpas completely, but did manage to grab some other photos.

 

The orange Ontario lilies I have scads of all come from a single clump that fell off the back of a landscaper’s truck one day years ago. I spotted the clump on my drive to work and made a mental note to grab it on the way home. My mental notes routinely get lost….as did this one. I drove right on past, oblivious to the clump lying on the shoulder of the other direction. The next morning, I saw it again, incredibly still alive after a whole day of baking its roots in the July sun. Another mental note was made….and ignored! This went on for the whole week until I finally did remember to pick it up and take it home. I planted it in the new driveway garden I put in that year and it settled in as though created to be growing in that very spot! I have hundreds of them now, and have dug them up and divided them several times over the years. Those plants went along the creek and in the beds by the front door.

 

This year’s crop in the driveway garden look as though they could use another dig and divide, so next year that will be on the agenda. I’d like to plant some here and there in the countryside as I used to see these lilies everywhere growing wild, and now only ever see them in someone’s garden. I’d like to see them make a comeback!

There is a lovely patch of a wild flower that I believe is some sort of Vetch, just near the top of the north hill. It seems so exuberant, spilling over the old fence and growing in stand alone patches throughout the field.

I planted some roses years ago, and they are horribly straggly plants that I often consider digging up and tossing out. But then they bloom, and with their twisted stems hidden in the growth of neighbouring plants the flowers seem to just float amongst the garden, and I remember why they stay put after all, every year.

Plant Lady