plant that blooms so hard you can HEAR it, and a tiny little beauty

 Tiny Beauty

More red stemmed filaree (Erodium cicutarium),

also known as stork's bill because of what their seeds look like which,

incidentally, can feel like STEEL stabbing through your sneakers.

It's a flat little plant, blooming this month, but I never knew

until I stared rudely at it w/a macro

how amazing its architecture is. Stunner.

(seeing individual pollen grains makes me swoon)

Blue anthers? Hot pink stigma? What?!? 

Little honey bee excitedly floating from flower to flower in February.

I'm curious why the bee is sipping where she's sipping.

Where does the lovely nectar come out?

Is it there so that the plant can brush against the bee's tummy

to pick up and deposit pollen?

These are my questions.

Hark, I Hear Spring!

Practically the only other thing blooming right now

is the Mariposa manzanita (Arctostaphylos viscida ssp. mariposa)

(with HUGE thanks to randomtruth for correcting my mis-ID!):

However, this plant blooms in SUCH GREAT abundance, you can HEAR it.

Honest.

You'll be outside in the garden, kicking around, pretending to work, when:

Hark! What is that low buzzing coming from the ENTIRE property?

That's when you realize there are LEGIONS of bees ALL OVER

these tree/shrubs, and giant bumblebees seem to be setting up territories

to guard their particular patch o' manzanita blooms.

Pretty smart to bloom early when the bees are THIRSTY for fresh nectar

and hardly anything else is blooming, so you get LOTS of attention.

And I didn't see this bug until I uploaded the photos:

And only took one photo of this clump, so that bug WINS!

No idea what it is.

Besides GREAT at being overlooked.

Just like the red stemmed filaree.

I love "discovering" amazing things that have been there all along.

Nature: the more you look, the more you walk around, gobsmacked.

Love it.

xoxoxo

bb

living in a cloud: wintry dawn in April

  

Our yard this morning, 26 dF.

Is it me, or does white leaf manzanita

look amazing with snow on it?

xo

bb

P.S. I heard a twitter rumor that today and tomorrow a.m. may be good conditions for frazil ice at Yosmemite NP. Of course, tomorrow, the park may be CLOSED due to government shut down, so... (if you've NOT seen the video, click on "frazil ice" above and check it out. It's AMAZING. Trust me. =)

more species in bloom chez-nous (at our house)...

            
Walked around our property a few days ago, searching for any species newly in bloom, and very nearly walked right past this beauty.

I believe it's a Sierra gooseberry, Ribes roezlii (http://www.calflora.org/cgi-bin/species_query.cgi?where-calrecnum=7137). Just learned from my beloved Calflora that it's a California endemic! Nice.

A gorgeous, dramatic bloom, and a flush of them, but this is why I almost passed it: they're cleverly hanging below the branches, so the shrub, even in it's full glory, looks like this.

Not exactly a show stopper.

And to redress an earlier oversight, here's the steadily blooming white leaf manzanita (Arctostaphylos viscida).

You can pretty much hear when they are in bloom.

The background sound on our property changes from nothing to the steady hum of many, many bees when this plant blooms. The first time I stepped outside and heard it I was quite confused. There's such a profusion of blooms on just one tree, and we have dozens, that en masse they change the soundscape entirely.

(I am presently being chortled at by an early morning robin, singing to greet the sunrise.)

Mystery plant that I must try to figure out. Small guy. Blooms smaller than fingernail.

Here's a better shot of a different mystery plant, the tiny, tiny bloom I blogged about earlier.

(I'm starting to think this robin has a head mic like Madonna--this is a loud song!)

Body of tiny bloom. Cute little rounded spade-shaped leaves.

Our local Dodecatheon representative. Looks like they've just started blooming at our house. I'd say, based on the leaves, it's Henderson's shooting star, Dodecatheon hendersonii.

Here's a hint of things to come, along those lines...

A veritable profusion of Dodecatheon plants... this site should be awash in blooms before too long. I love their sweet, simple leaves.

And lastly, a mystery grass species...

It's near the very edge of our property. I'll have to figure out whether it's friend or foe, and to what degree, before I decide what to do with it. Once you are professionally trained to rid the native landscape of exotics, it's hard to stop... 

NOT that I've been terribly conscientious about that on our property, outside of yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis) patrol. Maybe this blog will inspire me to address the non-native issues we have in a more methodical way.

As if I used to get paid to do this. =)

the biobabbler

P.S. Anyone know what any of these mystery plants are, by all means, enlighten me. Guesses are welcome. =)