Who says flowers need petals to be pretty?

Of the large genus of panic grasses, Panicum virgatum is one of the biggest--it is even majestic.  It is a local grass here in Massachusetts, as well as being important in the tallgrass prairie and an important food for livestock.  It has just come into bloom in my yard.

These are a part of the little "prairie garden" of native grasses, goldenrods, milkweeds and the like  I allow to run riot, only cutting it back when it begins to block our driveway.

Only a few days ago, finally taking a close look at the flowers, did I realize how beautiful they are.  Each plump flower in the large cluster is individual.  Pistils extend feathery orange stigmas to catch wind-borne pollen grains from neighboring grasses, while purple stamens in turn release pollen grains to the breeze.

Attending to Grasses

Today, our first good walk in three days (the dogs and I a bit rain-shy), I made a mental note to mow the front lawn.  But first I needed to take a better look at the grasses before mowing them down.  That led to the idea to attend to grasses on our walk.  A fair number of grasses are in flower, and more have finished flowering and are setting fruit. 

 The grass above is still in flower; you can just make out the stamens dangling from diminutive flowers.

The grass below is finished flowering, and its fruit developing.

Passers-by watched a strange guy crouch on the sidewalk with a camera intent on who-knows-what, while two small dogs tugged at their leashes.  The movement of the delicate stalks with the slightest breeze made the photography challenging; and I quickly decided on plan B: pick a few stalks of whatever looked different, and add it to the growing bouquet in my shirt pocket. (The stranger with camera and dogs got stranger still.)

I lay my finds on the kitchen table, trying to eliminate repeats.  I still find it a little amazing how many different grasses my little suburban neighborhood hosts.  Even the most manicured of lawns usually has a neglected corner--a bit of wild that begins to redeem the property in my eyes.

 The entire pocket collection.  A dozen-odd species, I think.

 Close-ups.

What are their names, you might ask?  I don't know myself.  Call them Tom, Dick, Harry, Hermione...  Their being matters more than their names, after all--just as yours does.  But familiarity is difficult without a "handle"--just as it is in learning people.

So it might be time to brush-up on grass ID.  Subject for a future post, perhaps?

Spring 8

 New job is keeping me busier than usual.  Catching up on the last few days.

 Time to take a peek at some things I've been ignoring: the very cultivated, the very small, the very inconspicuous.  

Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is a favorite of mine, though I sometimes ignore 

the pink variety on the grounds that it is a cultivar. 

 

 

The flowers of flowering dogwood are actually small and inconspicuous--

it is the bracts (modified leaves) below the inflorescence that we first notice.

source: http://ohioplants.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Cornus-florida-floers.jpg 

 

This little red-flowered weed (whose name I"ll remember tomorrow) has halberd-shaped leaves that taste very like sour apple--very nice in a salad, I'll bet--making this fellow lucky to have a lawn so blest.

(It's Sheep- or Field-Sorrel, Rumex acetosella.)

Some small grasses, including some in my lawn, are in their glory right now.  Many people 

would be surprised to know that grasses have flowers at all, small and petal-less as they are.

Here is the first portrait of the red maple I have been following for Nature's Notebook and these pages.  

The fruit is almost ripe, having turned a rusty red different from the bright red flowers of April.

The fruit on its neighbor a short distance down the same street is still mostly green.  

Why? it may be that my maple, very near an intersection, gets more sun than the other.

Maples are supposed to be dioecious--the whole tree either male or female.  My red maple is this way--a vigorous female.  (Being all one sex is rather uncommon in the plant world, by the way, with most flowers bisexual, being both male [producing pollen] and female [producing ovules & forming seeds].)  Others are monoecious, with flowers either male or female, but both found on the same plant.  But most common are  bisexual (aka androgynous) plants and flowers.  What, then, to make of Norway maple, which has male and female AND bisexual flowers on the same tree, and even the same inflorescence?  Such plants glory in the term androgynomonoecious!

The flowers visible here are bisexual, having both pollen-producing stamens (little yellow structures 

on the ends of stalks inside the flower facing us) and a pistil (protruding from the flower's center, 

and ending in a double-curl) that contains the ovules and becomes the fruit.

Sugar maples have been revealing themselves; the ones I have been watching have at least two neighbors on the same street.  One of the two close neighbors of the tree I've been following turns out to be female: it is modestly hung with keys. 

Most of the keys are visible in upper center, marking this tree as a female.  The many holes in the leave tell us that insects are emerging. and that sugar maple leaves are tasty!