Dogwood: Lipstick Pink
Gray dogwood. One of many of the Cornus genus, a gaggle of rather dull little shrubs. It’s a nondescript bush most of the year, short, stubby, with gray twigs and floppy leaves. Nothing remarkable about it at all. Until fall, when it begins to flash the most garish shade of hot, sexy pink that you’ve ever seen on a make-up counter or nail polish bottle. The leaves turn a nice, decorous dark red, and the berries are just a bland grayish-beige–it’s the stems, of all unlikely things, that are so very pink. And like lipstick and nail polish, the bright color is meant to...
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Goldenrod Safari
A hungry predator crawls through a leafy jungle. Slow cautious movements make no sound. The well-camouflaged predator waits, motionless. Powerful forelegs stretch wide to grab its unwary prey. Beware the goldenrod jungle! A single goldenrod plant is a complex habitat, the leaves, stems, and flowers providing food and shelter for a bewildering variety of strange, hidden creatures. Each goldenrod plant has thousands of tiny blossoms crammed together, their nectar providing a vital late-summer source of nutrition for butterflies, moths and bees. Take a safari along the length of a goldenrod...
Read MoreLeaf Miner: An Artist’s Journey
The Highlights Foundation in Boyds Mills, PA. An oasis of calm and creativity, a place for writers and illustrators to work. In between revising chapters and tinkering with adjectives, I took a walk along one of the woodland trails, and discovered that an artist had been this way before me. Not an illustrator of children’s books; an illustrator of leaves. It looks as though some demented graffiti artist has been spray-painting leaves in crazy, random patterns. But this botanical doodling is the work of an insect called a leaf miner. There are hundreds of species of leaf miners, which...
Read MoreHeal-All: First Aid Kit
Heal-all is a hardy, ubiquitous little wildflower–in fact, it’s found all over the world in temperate zones. On a mowed lawn it will flower at two inches high, though it can get knee-high in a meadow. The square stem and opposite leaves show that it’s in the mint family, though with no minty smell. A humble little plant, easy to overlook. But it’s often noticed by bumblebees–the short, strong stems and stubby flower heads are a handy perch for the portly insects, who need stalwart flowers to support their weight. Bumblebees are important plant pollinators whose...
Read MoreIs A Tomato A Fruit Or A Vegetable?
Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? The answer to this question is easy. It just happens to change every time someone asks it.
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