Mostly Pictorial Except When I Can't Shut Up

Path through the little maples.

Part of the loop through the gone-to-seed goldenrod, blurry where I stitched it.
One of the Chinese chestnut trees we grew from nuts from a tree on the farm next door. I'm not old enough to remember the chestnut blight, but I'm old enough to have grown a tree from a nut!
And now those trees are old enough to be producing spiky chestnut burrs of their own.

Last, a fungus, some kind of earthstar, growing just outside the dripline of a youngish red oak. I'm going to invoke the power of the internet here and ask, "Which the heck earthstar is this?" This one was about 6 inches across, and one of the others was about 8 inches across. They came up in a rough crescent around the oak tree, a couple of dozen of them.

My husband is into mycology, so we have quite a few mushroom field guides, and I haven't found any that really seem to match these.


So if you know any mycology professors who are into earthstars, point them at this one!