The bungleweed, or carpetweed, is adding blues and purples to the ground right now. A native plant to Europe, it is sometimes considered an invasive plant in parts of North America where it has been used for ground cover and has ‘escaped’.
Bungleweed
The irises had one day of glory in the sun before the rain and hail pounded on the poor flowers.
Sunny Irises
The flowers are finally emerging. The poor daffodils had popped up two months ago, only to be frozen and snowed on numerous times, but at last they have a chance to open their blossoms. Some wildflowers also emerged overnight. Maybe, just maybe, spring or summer has finally arrived.
Finally Spring
May 1st, often called May Day, just might have more holidays than any other day of the year. It’s a celebration of Spring. It’s a day of political protests. It’s a neopagan festival, a saint’s feast day, and a day for organized labor. In many countries, it is a national holiday.
There are many traditions for May Day, depending on what country one is in, including the May Pole and in some parts of the United States, May Baskets are made. These are small baskets usually filled with flowers or treats and left at someone’s doorstep. The giver rings the bell and runs away. The person receiving the basket tries to catch the fleeing giver. If they catch the person, a kiss is exchanged.
Well this year, the May Baskets would be filled with treats and no flowers as this one stem is the only flower I found blooming at my place this morning.
May Day
There are different theories about the origins of Valentine’s Day, with some placing the origin with the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia that occurred February 13th to the 15th. The festival included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be coupled up for the duration of the festival and maybe even longer, if the match was right.
In the 3rd century, the Roman Emperor Claudius II thought marriage was not good for war since men wanted to stay home with their wives, so he outlawed marriage. At the time there was a Christian priest named Valentine who felt sorry for the couples and married people in secret. When Claudius found out, he threw Valentine in jail and executed him on February 14. Before his death however, Valentine wrote a letter to the jailer’s daughter, who had become his friend and signed it from your Valentine.
St. Valentine’s Day began as a liturgical celebration of one or more early Christian saints named Valentinus. The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.
Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, though written Valentine’s didn’t begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife.
Whatever the origin, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year.
Happy Valentine’s Day
With the new snowfall, there is very little color on the landscape, and certainly no bright yellow flowers. Bright flowers and even colorful spiders won’t reappear for a few more months.
This successful spider, carrying its latest victim, is called the goldenrod crab spider or flower (crab) spider, because it is commonly found hunting in goldenrod sprays in the autumn. The goldenrod attracts a large numbers of insects and therefore, the older female spider will prey there to produce the best possible clutch of eggs.
Younger females will hunt on a variety of flowers such as daisies and sunflowers and are able to change their color to yellow or white. The color change takes several days to complete.
The goldenrod crab spider does not build webs but instead they ambush their prey and they have small jaws with venom to take on larger insects.
Goldenrod Crab Spider
The sun is shining bright but there are no Lupines or bees collecting pollen to be found this late into the fall. There are approximately 280 species of Lupinus, commonly known as Lupin or Lupine.
Lupins make good companion plants for crops that need significant amounts of nitrogen in their soil since lupins can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and this allows lupins to be tolerant of infertile soils and capable of pioneering change in barren and poor quality soils.
The yellow legume seeds of lupins, commonly called lupin beans, were popular with the Romans, who spread the plant’s cultivation throughout the Roman Empire.
Colorful Lupine
Another flower that I would ‘hunt for in the spring’, is the Glory-of-the-snow (Chinodoxa), originating in the alpine regions of Turkey, Crete and Cyprus, where each year it transforms the landscape from snowy white to blue. It’s therefore fitting that its botanical name comes from the Greek chion, meaning “snow,” and doxa, meaning “glory.”
I suppose one would be in glory seeing the snow melt and the flowers blooming after a long winter.
Glory-of-the-snow
Looking out at the flower bed this morning, the purple asters have turned mostly brown after several nights in the low teens. So the purple I’m thinking of as part of this week’s ‘the hunt for spring’ theme, is the tiny crocus which can often appear through the snow in the spring. According to legend the Greek Gods Zeus & Hura loved each other so passionately that the land where they lived burst open with crocuses.
The crocus was not native to North America, but instead came on ships by settlers who planted them around their cabins. But while not native here, the crocus has been cultivated since at least 1550 BC in the Mediterranean area. The lavender-flowered, fall-blooming crocus (C. sativus) has been grown for saffron the flower produces which was used as a spice, a dye, a medicine, and also in perfumes.
Saffron has always been expensive, even during its use in the Minoan culture, where the same weights used to measure gold were used for saffron. The reason for the expense is the labor-intensive nature of the production process of crushing the dried stigmas of the flower for the powder. During the brief blooming, the stigmas of C. sativus are painstakingly separated from the petals and stamens and then dried, a procedure best carried out on the day of the collection. Each crocus has three stigmas, and it takes about 160,000 flowers to produce 11 lbs of wet stigmas, which converts to 2 lbs of dried spice.
I might have to start growing the fall crocus instead of the spring crocuses since that 2 lbs of dried spice is approximately worth $10,000. Course growing 160,000 flowers to get that two pounds might be difficult with my chipmunks digging up my flower bed all the time!
Colorful Crocus
I guess I have to admit defeat and accept that winter is coming. So the geranium plants that I been tucking inside the garage each night were relocated to the basement today and my mother did the same thing today so it is official – winter is coming.
Relocated Geraniums
