What Does It Look Like Where You Live?

I'm embarrassed to say I almost completely blanked on the Great Lakes Lace Group's Spring Fling, what with sitting in the emergency room Friday, and my husband getting back from Camp Robinson in Arkansas. I remembered Sunday, and decided not to drive up to Grand Rapids.

So how about a meme?

Bells in Canberra says, ". . .let's turn it into a meme! I wanna see where people live! Go for a walk, 15-20 minutes from home, and take photos on the way!" so I took the camera for a walk on our SW Michigan property this morning. The photo above is the old two-track on our property, walking straight south from our road. Almost all of the trees are skinny little maples that grew up from the seeds of the big maples along our west property line.

If I walk through these little maples, turn left, and climb the hill, I see this to the east. It was corn (Zea mays) last year, so it's probably soybeans this year.

The house and barns in the distance belong to some of our closest neighbors. What you can't see in this picture is the 15-20 mile-per-hour wind that has been buffeting us since last night.

Then if I walk south along the ridge, I go down to a little seep, a swampy spot with a remnant of the wildflowers that were under the beech wood that was here before the farmers came.

On the left, mostly trout lilies, Erythronium americanum, and on the right, trilliums, Trillium grandiflorum, just starting to come out. When the trilliums all bloom, this little hillside is white with them. The trout lilies are named for their speckled leaves, like the sides of a trout.


A couple of species of violets, both blue and yellow, are coming into bloom down here.

We noticed this odd trillium plant before we had the snowstorm a week and a half ago. Instead of having three leaves and three petals, it has four leaves and four petals. The leaves got a little frozen around the edges, but the flower still bloomed out.

My little plot of wildflowers and fields-gone-wild seem pretty ordinary to me, because I'm used to them, but maybe they are more interesting to you.

How about you? What does it look like where you live?