I’ve heard for years about efforts to restore prairies, and many times I’ve walked past a reconstructed prairie wetland at a local park, but today was the first time I took a good look at one and got to actually walk around in it. A group of us went on a tour of a prairie owned by a friend of the person who organized the trip, and we learned a lot about prairies.
One thing that surprised me was the need for repeated use of herbicides at the beginning of the restoration project, to first get rid of the invasive species of plants, before seeding with native species. It makes sense, once I thought about it, but the words conservation and herbicide had not gone together in my mind before.
I also was surprised by the need for burning the prairie every few years. I knew that fire was a normal part of the life cycle of the prairie, but I had not realized it would be that frequent (she said about every three to five years). She showed us some of the equipment used for the burns, and a number of photographs from past burns. Clearly having a prairie is a lot of careful planning and hard work.
I’ve never learned to recognize very many different plants, and there were dozens there in the prairie. (She showed us a chart of which plants bloom each month – I’d never even heard of many of them, let alone know how to recognize them.) But I enjoyed seeing them, and I enjoyed even more when we were invited to get off the hayride wagon and walk into the prairie. I don’t normally take selfies, but this seemed like one time to do it.
I have lived near the Mississippi for almost twenty years, and have crossed it thousands of times driving to work and home again, but today was the first time I have been on the Mississippi, riding on the Channel Cat Water Taxi. Before we got on, I got to enjoy watching and photographing the birds (and a turtle) that make their home along this stretch of river.
There are several bridges, and the I-74 bridge is not the one I use daily, but I have used the old one a number of times over the years, and now I have used the new one several times as well. But it’s quite different to see the bridge from down below.
I got home from Nevada this afternoon, after a three-day conference in Reno (for users of the student information system that I work with). I suppose some of the other conference attendees may have spent time in the casino, but my two co-workers and I were glad to get outdoors in the afternoon and away from flashing lights, crowds of people, and what I considered the ridiculous glitziness of the hotel.
Tuesday I was too busy after the afternoon sessions preparing for my presentation at one of the breakout sessions on Wednesday morning (on using SQL to retrieve data from the student information system). But Wednesday afternoon I felt free to relax and walked to Virginia Lake Park (which one of my co-workers had found on Tuesday afternoon). Then yesterday the three of us went together to Quail Run Nature Trail (which the same co-worker had found on Wednesday).
I had paid zero attention to what there was to see or do in Reno when I planned my trip, since I expected to spend most of my time in conference sessions. So I had had no idea that it was surrounded by mountains, or that there was open country so close to the city. I understand why conferences have to be held in conference centers, but it sure is nice to get away from them for a while.
Virginia LakeWaterfowl on Virginia LakeVirginia Lake with mountains in backgroundNevada landscapeCows here, Reno back there
I don’t care for large crowds of people, or loud music, so a lot of the popular shows in Branson, MO have no appeal to me. What I did find very appealing was the Butterfly Palace, though I have to admit it was smaller and more crowded than I had imagined when I read about visiting “a magical place that allows you to be immersed in the beauty of the rainforest.”
There were lots of families with children, so it wasn’t exactly quiet, but on the whole that’s a more appealing sort of noise than with most crowds, and I approved of the reason for the kids’ excitement (even if the younger ones didn’t do too well at following the rule not to try to poke the butterflies with their nectar flowers). There were a lot of butterflies, and a lot of different kinds of butterflies, including some very colorful ones, and I spent a good deal of time trying to get good pictures, first on my camera and then my phone.
I did get some nice shots, I think (scroll down for a sampling), but the best part was setting aside the camera and phone and just enjoying the beauty around me. Most of the time I see butterflies so rarely that each one is a special treat, and here they were by the dozens (hundreds, somewhere around the facility, but it seemed like a lot of them stayed well out of reach and mostly out of sight). And while their rapid fluttering flight patterns, swooping in and out of sight, made it hard to get good pictures, it was pleasant to just watch their aerial acrobatics.
Afterward we watched a couple of movies, one about where the butterflies there come from, and another about monarch butterflies. I have to admit that previously I had never thought of the words butterfly and farm as going together – other than perhaps how modern commercial farming is reducing the habitat for many butterflies. But there are butterfly farms, and according to the movie they benefit both the people who work there and the environment, while also giving visitors to the Butterfly Palace a view of beautiful creatures they might never see otherwise (at least not alive and moving).
Reading some more on the internet later, I found there are a lot of articles about butterfly farming, which for now at least seems to be a good economic opportunity for many people in poorer countries. As with any money-making operation, it can have its dark side as criminals find ways to make extra money by skirting the law, in this case through what is called wildlife trafficking. And if supply catches up with demand (as usually happens eventually), it will be harder to make a living that way. But it sounds like the money people like me are willing to spend to visit places like the Butterfly Palace can do some good in other parts of the world.
The week after our visit, it was announced that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature now considers migratory monarch butterflies to be endangered. Interestingly, I read one article that points out how the previous large population of migratory monarchs was as much a result of people changing the environment around them as the current decline is. With our large populations and our technology, we can’t help but affect which species thrive while others do not. But it is good to be aware of the effects we are having, and to try to minimize major changes to ecosystems – which sooner or later will affect us also.
Until I started taking a walk at around sunset, I had never given much thought to where the sun sets each day. In the west, of course, but streets are often built along lines other than north/south or east/west, so exactly where due west in my neighborhood lies is I couldn’t say.
After I took a really nice photo of sunset several months ago, however, I started trying to get more photos of sunset. I knew that the time of sunset changes each day, so at first I thought the reason I couldn’t get the same shot again was due to timing. But before long it became clear that the sun was no longer setting behind the same tree (and it was the tree, hiding the brightest part of the setting sun, that had made the picture so good).
Now when I take a walk at sunset, the sun is in quite a different part of the sky. Still to the west, of course, but considerably north of where it was in January. I had not realized there would be that big a difference in where the sun met the horizon.
I suppose I may have learned about this in eighth grade Earth Science – but if I did, the knowledge faded along with how to interpret weather maps and understand how the high and low pressure systems shape our weather. Most of my life, I simply didn’t live somewhere that I could easily get to a point where the horizon was visible, either to the east or west. I enjoyed sunrises and sunsets when I saw them, but by the time the sun got over the surrounding houses and trees, any sense of the point where it rose or set was lost.
Even now that I live in a relatively flat bit of Iowa (though even in my neighborhood, within a one-mile walk the elevation varies from a low of 688 feet to a high of 716 feet, more than I would have expected prior to using MapMyWalk to track my route), I have to walk a couple of blocks to get to an open field to the west. (To see the horizon to the east I’d have to go to the Mississippi, an easy bike road going, but a bit harder coming back uphill from its lower elevation of about 550 feet.) And I never bothered going out there to see the sunset until that day in January, when working from home made it easy to take a walk at sunset.
Even knowing that the tilt of the earth on its axis is responsible for the changes in the temperature as well as how many hours of daylight we get, I’m having trouble getting a picture in my mind of how this moves sunset in January, behind the trees to the south of the open field, to sunset in June behind trees to the north of that field. To help understand it, this article shows how to build a model to track the sun’s movement across the sky at different times of the year. I like making stuff, so I plan on giving this a try.
I know there are different kinds of evergreens, but until now I had only heard the word used for trees. I have one in my front yard, and some in the back yard – what kind I couldn’t say. But on my evening walk I noticed some rather striking plants, tall with a lot of white blossoms, and took a picture on my phone to try to find out what they were.
According to app, they are a kind of yucca, specifically Adam’s Needle. That surprised me, because I had always thought yucca was something that grows in the hot, dry Southwest. That’s where they are from, it turns out, but they can do quite well in other climates as long as they get plenty of sun. And there are a number of different varieties of yucca. (That page notes that it “shouldn’t be planted in areas where it may come in contact with people,” which makes me wonder why, at the two yards where I saw it, it is planted by the driveway or front walk.)
What surprised me more was to see that yucca is considered an evergreen. It doesn’t surprise me too much to find out there are evergreen shrubs, since some of them look rather similar to evergreen trees. Boxwood, yew, juniper – they fit my mental image of “evergreen.” But I was surprised to find out that mountain laurel is an evergreen. My parents had one growing by the driveway, but I guess I probably never paid attention to how it looked in the winter. And yucca is one too, though its shape doesn’t fit my notion of “shrub” either.
Of course, I had been thinking of shrub and bush as pretty much the same thing. Whether they are or not apparently depends on whom you ask. According to this page there is no well-defined difference, with usage being a matter of personal preference. But according to this page they are different, with bushes having dense branches. And these yucca plants don’t have any of what I would call “branches,” just leaves and stems, and lots of flowers.
It’s hot again this week, and I didn’t think rain was forecast for a few more days, so I thought I’d need to water my vegetable garden when I got back from my evening walk. I was surprised to see on my phone (kept handy during walks to take pictures) that rain was expected in the next five minutes. Yes, there were some clouds, but I thought I had time for a twenty-minute walk.
Halfway around the first block, I got a notice on my phone of a special weather alert, thunderstorms expected for the next hour. Hmm, the sky was getting darker, and not just because it was nearly sunset. But while behind me the sky was getting to be a solid gray, ahead were clouds in rather interesting shapes. I don’t know whether the first one looks to you like one dragon preparing to bite another dragon’s head, or the second one like a man and woman playing cards, but that’s how they looked to me, at least for a few moments before the increasingly blustery wind reshaped them.
Fortunately the first raindrops did not hit until I was about ten feet from the back door. So I didn’t get wet, but my garden did. This is the first time I have tried growing bell peppers, and I wasn’t too sure they would grow well for me, since the one other time I tried growing peppers (I forget what kind but I think my son had picked some kind of hot peppers), I got plenty of flowers but never even the slightest hint of an actual pepper. But so far they seem to be doing well.
Back in the office after taking a lunchtime walk and taking a few photos of flowers on my phone, I was paging through the photos when I noticed something new. In the center of each photo there was a leaf-shaped icon, and when I tapped on the icon it brought up Siri Knowledge with an identification of the flower in the picture.
Apparently I had unknowingly tapped first on the Info icon, which enables Visual Look Up, which can recognize plants and animals (as well as landmarks, works of art, and I’m not sure how much more) in photos taken on the iPhone. It’s kind of hit or miss what it recognizes, but it easily identified the irises and mayapples (which it identified with the alternate name of American mandrake).
I went back through some older photos, and discovered that the leafy plant I had previously been unable to identify is arum italicum. I’m not sure how well it does on identifying trees, since I don’t know myself what most of the trees are that I have taken photos of. I had been planning to look for a book at the library to help me learn to identify them, but with Visual Look Up I have a big head start, as I can look up the proposed identification and see if it matches the details.
It doesn’t get everything right, of course. It identified the blue and silver pinwheels as sea holly. And it thinks my freshly mown grass is ragweed. The photos of the bunny in my yard apparently don’t fit anything in its database, as it doesn’t even display the icon (a paw, I think, though I haven’t gotten one yet). Sometimes it displays an icon (as with the grass with a dusting of snow), then when I click on it I get “No Content Found.”
But I learned that the first flowers I found in my yard this spring were crocuses, and that the tree I had been so curious about a few months ago is a tulip tree (I can verify these by looking at photos of these plants online). I can now start my tree identification project when I take walks (something I started thinking about a few months ago, but didn’t know how to get started), without having to keep flipping through pages of some tree field guide trying to find a match. And I can learn about all the flowers I see just by taking pictures.
I never used to take much interest in learning to recognize different plants, other than to know which ones to avoid (e.g. poison ivy) and which plants in my garden were those I had planted (so I didn’t pull them up by mistake when weeding). I knew some common types of trees, mostly the ones that were in the yard when I was growing up, plus paper birches which provided such nice material for arts and crafts (if I found it on the ground, that is – never taken off the living tree).
This winter, as I walked around looking for interesting things to take pictures of on my new smartphone, I started paying more attention to the details of different trees. I quickly realized that I had no idea what kind of trees any of them were, even the ones I would have recognized in the summer by their leaves. And I became interested in trying to learn to recognize different trees – though I decided to postpone that learning until it was warm enough to enjoy lingering outdoors to examine trees more closely.
There are lots of trees with small leaves now, but also plenty with little more than buds, so I’m still waiting to see their leaves better. But I’ve been noticing other leaves, growing close to the ground, that I’ve become curious about. One set of plants I noticed yesterday got my attention with its bright green leaves, with a shape different from plants I was familiar with.
As I paged through websites displaying various plants, trying to find a match for my photo, I began to feel that I was looking for a needle in a haystack. But finally I saw a picture that matched mine pretty closely. These plants appear to be Podophyllum peltatum, commonly known as may-apple. Reading more about them, I saw that the beginning on an “apple” would not be easily visible, as the leaves hide them when seen from above. So I went back today, and sure enough, when I looked closely I could see one, nearly hidden by the leaves.
If I’m correct in my identification of these, it’s nothing I’d want in my garden, as most parts of the plan are toxic. But they’re pretty to look at.
I took pictures of another set of plants that caught my eye, but so far I haven’t figured this one out:
I’m not particularly big on tulips, compared to other garden flowers. As it happens there are a few along the side of my back yard, planted by some previous owner of this property. I didn’t even remember they were there until I noticed them while mowing the yard today. Perhaps they were hidden by the overgrowth of vines, much of which we had removed last fall – there are hyacinths near them that I didn’t remember either (I had to look up pictures online to figure out what they were).
But when I saw that there was going to be a tulip festival (the first annual tulip festival, according to the website) at a farm less than an hour away, I thought it would be a fun outing on a Saturday afternoon, someplace new to see, and to spend time getting to know a friend from Bible study. That, and an opportunity to take pictures, which I prefer to bring home with me in place of the flowers themselves.
As it turned out, I didn’t get all that close to the tulip beds. While there was no admission charge to the tulip festival itself, it cost $5 to go among the tulips, in addition to the cost of any tulips picked. Lots of people were clearly happy to spend that, as many people were walking around with a collection of tulips. But I was happy to look down on the bright array of flowers from up on the hill, and get good pictures using my zoom lens.
The farm also has an apple orchard, though I had no idea what kind of trees there were until my friend (who had been there before) told me. When I was growing up, there was an apple tree in my back yard, and I knew that if my parents pruned it they would get much better apples, but I never imagined that apple trees would be pruned to the extent of these trees. Now I want to go back there in the fall and see the apple trees full of fruit (and I’ll be happy to buy some of those to take home).
Posted by Pauline 
Perennial Student 