![]() ![]() Finally they will fall from the plant and the wind will catch the tiny wings and blow them to new places to grow. It looks like a seed pearl at this stage but as they ripen and age the seed and its wing will turn brownish. If you look closely, you will see that each flake, which is more like a wing, has a tiny seed on it. Waterfowl and other birds love its seeds.Ĭurly dock ( Rumex crispus) has flowered and is now producing its tiny winged seeds, which look a bit like stalks full of flakes. This common sedge is also called bottlebrush sedge. Porcupine sedge ( Carex hystericina) had recently flowered and I knew that because the tiny threads at the ends of the perigynia were still white. If you have trouble sleeping at night just read Asa’s manual for a half our or so before bedtime. I read my copy about 50 years ago and have used it many times since that initial reading. Gray’s sedge is named after Asa Gray, who wrote Grays Manual of Botany in 1848. They start out white and brown as they age. Coming out of each beak are the flowers, which are what look like threads in this photo. A perigynium is a fleshy cup or tube, which in this case comes to a point or beak. A botanist would say this about that: each spikelet consists of a globoid cluster of perigynia that radiate in all directions. Gray’s sedge ( Carex grayi) always reminds me of the spiky mace weapons that knights used in the Middle Ages. The flowers are tiny and not showy, but overall the plant is pleasing to the eye. Anything appearing above the flowers is a bract, not part of the stem. The flower head, shown in the above photo, looks like it grows from one side of the stem but the stem actually ends at the flowers. They feel soft if you pinch them, not sharp. Sedge stems are triangular and have edges but soft rush stems are smooth and cylindrical, with a light pith inside. They’re interesting if placed here and there around garden ponds. Soft rush can form large clumps and are easy to grow. Ditches are always a good place to find a variety of plants that like wet feet, like rushes and sedges. Soft or common rush ( Juncus effusus) also grew in a ditch alongside the road. In fact my knees were getting wet so this isn’t a very good shot. They like wet places and often grow right where the water meets the shore. This is our first yellow loosestrife to bloom each year and I sometimes see them in great numbers. Swamp candles ( Lysimachia terrestris) burned brightly in roadside ditches. In China it is called the Reishi mushroom, and scientists around the world are researching its anti-cancer potential. It is considered the most important of all the herbs and substances used in Chinese Herbal Medicine, including ginseng. It’s about the size of a salad plate less diameter than a dinner plate but more than a saucer. ![]() This one went from looking like a piece of dough to what we see here in less than two weeks. ![]() For the first time I’ve had a chance to see these mushrooms grow day by day and I can now understand that they grow quite fast. I’ve seen lots of hemlock varnish shelf fungi ( Ganoderma tsugae) on an old hemlock stump and the pile of logs beside it. The big circular plant colonies are all yellow pond lilies, and they appear to be trying to take over the pond. If I choose to go this way, I can see a pond full of water plants like burr reed and yellow pond lilies. I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog lately that I’ve been doing a lot of walking, so I thought I’d show you some of the things I see on these walks. ![]()
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