80AcresOnline

It has slowly spread over the years since we introduced it–faster in wet years, of course.  Right here it’s growing with wild onion (at the end of its flowering)  and is overlapping other flower types the bees enjoy.   Bees were too busy toward late afternoon to let me catch them on anything but the obedient plant.

Although I didn’t photograph bees on anything but this, I did see quite a few butterflies and caught this one on Queen Anne’s Lace.  It’s a Common Buckeye, with the sun coming through one wing.

The two together in a glass of water.  The Brazoria, the larger, is almost scentless; the tiny one, which has rosy-pink flowers that are darker red inside, grows thickly on damp areas of the east grass, is intensely aromatic.  Some year I mean to collect leaves and try them in the kitchen–but they are tiny leaves.   The whole plant grows only 4-6 inches tall.  EDITED 5-8-2016.  R- found an online photo reference.  The small one is Slender Hedeoma, Hedeoma acinoides.  It’s the 333rd plant IDed on the place.

Upstream from the obedient plants and tallgrass clumps, the old ditch is full of wild onions with other plants mixed in, and the field itself has Queen Anne’s Lace, gaillardia, and gold thread, with Brazoria under the grass in the damper spots.  The gaillardias have not peaked yet, and the rudbeckias and other coneflowers haven’t started.

Gaillardia getting started–many more to come.