A small blur buzzed by me and landed on a bare branch, watching me carefully. Satisfied that I was harmless, a hummingbird zoomed back to work on the flowers. What a moment.

A few days ago after rain I took these photos of Jewelweed. One article I read about Jewelweed claimed it was named for the way water droplets shone like jewels on its leaves. I think it’s for the deep rich tones of the flower.

Then today I saw a huge drift of jewelweed at the edge of a tiny creek.

But what I saw next was magical! Tune in tomorrow…

I can’t believe how many local wildflowers or plants I have seen this year that I have never seen before in my life.

I was walking along a tiny rivulet in the woods beside our pasture. It’s been a wet summer, so there were jungle-like conditions. Mosquitoes were plentiful, although not as bad as two weeks ago.

I saw this vine, and thought at first it was a kind of vetch flower. But the leaves are not at all vetch-like.

Hog Peanut (unfortunate name once again; I’m tempted to rename it…fairy vine?) is a versatile plant with edible seeds at the base of the plant, peanut like– not the seeds from these flowers I took pictures of. Yes, two sets of flowers and seeds on one plant. Amazing.

A sacred plant to the Osage people.

A thunderstorm brought strong winds, and this oak tree in our pasture was felled, bringing destruction to this complex apian civilization. Their structures look so alien to me.

My August 5 post was photos of Monarch butterflies “in the throes of passion”. Today we see another stage in the Monarch life cycle.

The origins of velcro. In the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to his dog’s fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook system that the seeds use to hitchhike on passing animals aiding seed dispersal, and he realized that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result of his studies was Velcro. (Wikipedia)