Flowers and Flowery Lace Knitting

I have a degree in horticulture, and my area of specialization was floriculture, but I don't have anything like an organized flower garden. I tend to plant things here and there, and because I recognize the seedlings and the early sprouts, mow around them in the grass.

I have flowers all over the place in random clumps. My brain presents me with scientific names memorized decades ago - where does it store all this stuff?I remembered the moth mullein was a Verbascum, but I didn't remember the species, V. blattaria.

My swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata, is not growing in a swamp. It is growing out of a crack in a concrete porch slab from the original farmhouse site, about as un-swampy as you could get.

Ever since I noticed a few years back how much the hummingbirds liked the catnip flowers, I've encouraged it, but they aren't the only thing that likes it.

This Silver-spotted Skipper, Epargyreus clarus, likes it, too. The skipper is very territorial, and comes back to the catnip over and over throughout the day. When I went out to take its picture, it flew off, but not very far, and within a minute was back where I could take a close-up.

And here's my White Henryi lily again. I just realized I bought the original bulbs about 25 years ago, and it's come back reliably year after year. 2011 has been a very rainy year, but it made a fine show back in 2008, which was dry.

White Henryi is one of the lilies Donna Lee was talking about in her comment, the ones with a scent that knocks you down and sits on you. Most of the Oriental lilies are like that - the green nectary star in the center is a fairly reliable indicator of strong-scentedness.
Personally, I'm not a fan of scents that knock me down and sit on me, so the majority of my lilies are Asiatics with little or no scent.

The knitting on Glöckchen is done:The casting-off is . . . half done.

Each of the twelve repeats has twenty-two crocheted chains, and I am not a very fast crocheter. I was hoping to finish by Saturday, but along about Thursday afternoon I realized I wouldn't make it. I'm still plugging along, though, because I can hardly wait to block this thing!

Wednesday Bits and Pieces

First, a little bit of responding to comments.

Becky said, "So *that* is what those kinds of spiders are! We quite frequently have them trying to live in our mailbox."

They get in my mailbox, too! My husband emphatically does NOT like spiders (this t-shirt is just made for him), and when these come in the house in the mail, I'm the one who escorts them back out again.

---

Cathy-Cate said, "My Asiatic lilies have never looked the same since a friend of ours (who is a landscaper) thinned them three years ago....he said they would bounce back better than ever in a couple years."

I have my suspicions about what he did! The way to thin lilies is to dig up all the bulbs after the stem starts to die and space them out, so each bulb has more growing room. But this takes a lot of time and a lot of labor.

The cheating way is to pull off the stems of some of the lilies in each clump, hoping to starve those bulbs out and let the ones left with their stems take over. This method is obviously a lot faster and easier than all that digging.

But the problem with this method is that if the lily variety is tough, instead of the stemless bulb dying, it just throws up a new stem the following year.

This new stem will be smaller and weaker and less likely to bloom, since it didn't get to store up as much energy when its stem was pulled off.

If this was what happened, I'd either leave them in place (the small stems will probably recover), or else dig them up and space them out in the fall.

---

Catsmum said, "I don't want to know what the stitch count will be by the final row."

Well, that's the thing about Nieblings, they don't always increase in a strict geometric way. In this particular doily, the stitch count got to 76 stitches per round in Round 139, leaped up to 101 per round in 140 (that make-a-triple-yarnover-into-13 bit), and has been decreasing by two stitches per pattern round ever since.

I just counted out the last chart round, and it has 91 stitches per repeat, so I'll be ending at 1,092 stitches in the final round.

I also stretched it out a little against a ruler, and it's at least two feet in diameter, even knitted in size 30 thread on a 2.0 mm needle.

---

In other news, we found some more beanie babies for Beanie Baby Wars.

An octopus mounted on an ice dragon.

A turkey mounted on a unicorn.

They're jousting.

---

Ah! And I finally got a picture of one of the hummingbirds at the feeder this year. I waited so long with the camera all set up that the power saver kept turning it off again.

My camera's preview screen has a speed of 30 frames per second, and when I watch the hummingbird on it, I can see the wings moving! But they were still too fast for the camera and showed up as blurs in the photos.

Glöckchen Progress, Lilies, a SPIDER!

If you are spider phobic, and don't even like to see pictures of spiders, I'm giving lots and lots of warning so you can look away. There is a spider photo at the end of this post!

One of the knitting projects I took to work on at Origins was Glöckchen, but I had only knitted on it a little bit before I remembered one of the reasons I had put it down.

It was so seriously crowded on the needle at over 900 stitches per round that at one point about 11 stitches oozed off the needle while it was between bouts of knitting!

I twisted my husband's arm and had him take me to Knitters' Mercantile one morning before we headed in to the convention. I bought a second US 0 (2.0 mm) circular, so I could stretch Glöckchen out a bit again.

The stitch count peaked at 1212 in Round 139, where you make a triple yarnover and then knit into it 13 times in the plain row. I am finally out to Round 149 with one more pattern round to go after this.

We came home to lilies in bloom.



I just realized my "Tiger Babies" lilies from The Lily Garden have been in the ground here for 20 years.

They look pretty crowded at this point, but after twenty years in one spot, many lilies would have crowded themselves completely out of bloom.

Okay, is everybody ready for my spider? Spider-phobics safely out of the room?
.
.
.
.
.white space, so you don't have to see it if you don't want to
.
.
.
.
.
Last chance to click away before seeing a close-up of a bold jumping spider, Phidippus audax.

Is that thing cool or what? Eyes, nose, and big white lips!

Poem of the Day

Mud
by Polly Chase Boyden

Mud is very nice to feel
All squishy-squash between the toes!
I'd rather wade in wiggly mud
Than smell a yellow rose.

Nobody else but the rosebush knows
How nice mud feels
Between the toes.

I don't remember the first time I read this poem, but I have the last line thoroughly stuck in my head, and it leaps into my head spontaneously when I see spring mud.

April is indeed the cruelest month for weather. According to the local airport weather station, last night the high temperature hit 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 C) - at 3am! Now that it's daytime, it's only 41 F (5 C). We haven't had our April snow yet, but that would be very typical.

The first Diana Wynne Jones book I ever read was Archer's Goon. I can't put my finger on one thing that I enjoyed so much, but it made me search out more of her books, like Dog's Body and Howl's Moving Castle.

I tend to like books with a certain level of complexity and background detail, so that when I re-read them, I pick out things on the second (or third) reading that I missed first time around. Most of her books have that.

I've been paging through old April posts, looking for inspiration. It's hard to believe it's been five years since I first knitted a Pi doily.

Let's see, what else has been happening?

I've been knitting little Niebling patterns from Bande 760.

Fig. 28:
Fig. 17:
Fig. 6:

Crocuses came up:

And snowdrops:

And the snow finally melted away.

Brown Thumb Gardener

I always wondered about that expression, "green thumb". In my experience, a real gardener's thumb is a brown thumb, or a black thumb, from digging in the dirt, viz:
My four o'clock roots had a great summer this year, and grew like crazy. My handspan, stretched out like that, is about 8.5 inches (21.5 cm). Look at the size of that root, and the piece of stem still on it. Wow.

When the soil dries and I clean them off, I'll have to weigh that thing. It's heavy!

In warm climates, I'm told four o'clock (Mirabilis jalapa) roots will overwinter in the ground, but here they freeze and die. They usually produce lots of seeds, so if you're pressed for space, you can save the seeds and grow a new batch next year.

But if you want to lift your four o'clock roots and save them, here is how I have done it for quite a few years now.

After the first frost, I dig up the roots and clean them. Some years I've sprayed them off with the hose, other years I've just let my sandy soil dry and brushed it off.

Then I put the clean dry roots in an open plastic bag (that is, not a ziplock type bag), and I set them aside and forget about them until we're past frost danger again. They literally sit on the floor next to my sewing machine all winter, in the room farthest from our soapstone stove, at around 65 degrees F (about 18 C), all winter.

When I plant them, the buds tell me whether the flowers will be pink (the leaf buds are pinkish red) or either yellow or white (green leaf buds).

When I haven't been turning my thumbs black digging in the dirt, I've been watching my parents' greyhound again:Ajax and Kasper were soaking up some late-November sunshine and a run of unseasonably warm days.

I'm still working on Glöckchen:

And!

I actually finished something and cast it off!

The "Lilac Time" (Marianne Kinzel's "Lilac Time") that I started last fall is finally finished. Whew.And now I apparently need to learn a new skill, starching doilies.

Thorny Post

Marguerite mentioned blackberries in her last couple of posts, and so did Lucia at Rhymes with Fuchsia. I had been twittering about the large and confusing genus Rubus, so I took the camera out for a walk in search of thorny things.

First off, what is the genus Rubus, anyway?

Rubus is the genus of a large group of plants including raspberries, dewberries, blackberries, and thimbleberries found all over North America.

When we moved to our property, I started noticing all different kinds and went to my Peterson wildflower field guide to sort out the differences.

Peterson, for once, blew me a literary raspberry of its own, saying only

Brambles (Blackberries, etc.)
Most plants of the genus Rubus are woody, prickly, or bristly shrubs, outside the scope of this book; most are problems for the specialist. Gray recognizes 205 species in our area. See A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs for a small selection.

So I suppose as soon as I finish patiently clicking through all 237 species shown at the USDA website, I might know what I have growing here.

This is what I see when I go out walking.These blackberries are my favorite kind for canning. They make a tall, stout cane with wicked thorns, but they also produce lots of fruit.

This is the main difference (in my mind, anyway, or maybe my local dialect) between a blackberry and a black raspberry.When I pick a blackberry, the center stays in. When I pick a raspberry (black, red, or golden/yellow), the center comes out and the edible berry is hollow.

Let's take another look at those thorns:Ouch!

Last year I found a happy hybrid: right down the path from the thorny ones, in the midst of a patch of trailing or sprawling thornless blackberries, a thornless blackberry with stout canes came up.It's in a shady spot, so the fruit is not ripe yet.

Check out the lack of thorns!I want to move them into the sun, but I don't want to kill them. I'll probably bury the leafy tip in a pot of soil and let it root.

I think this one is some kind of dewberry, but it never fruits enough to be sure. It has a fuzz of thorns, but they're bendy.
Then I have Rubus something-or-other with completely different leaves, a palmate leaf like a Virginia creeper.
These are the sprawling brambles I have everywhere, the ones that like to rip my ankles to shreds:The leaves turn an incredibly beautiful deep red in the fall, and in the spring they have such a delicate, crinkly-petalled white flower. Before I found the tall-caned ones, I used to pick and can these guys.

Their thorns don't look like much, but there are plenty of them.

Last of all, here is a black raspberry cane, next year's fruiting cane.I can't show any berries for them, because their season has ended.

(And so has this post.)

Basking

The snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) from two weeks ago are in full bloom.Several years ago, my mom gave me a clump of snowdrop bulbs. I planted them in a spot where they are obviously happy, and they have been spreading ever since.Here is the same clump in sunshine. I even saw a honeybee on them yesterday!
We're having a week of lovely warm and sunny weather. Of course, when I say "warm", that's Michigan lakeshore warm. The temperature has crept up to 60 F (about 16 C) a couple of times.

We've been outside in our short sleeves in the sunshine cleaning up the dead raspberry canes and goldenrod stems almost every day.

Tomorrow's forecast is for rain and snow with a high in the 30s (0 C), so now is the time to soak up the warm and sunny.

I love wandering around the yard searching out the early flowers. First sweet violet:
A clump of daffodils that was barely an inch high a week ago:
The very first rosette of columbine leaves:Green everywhere!

One of the wonderful things about being outdoors with the camera is serendipitous pictures. While I was walking around looking for green leaves, I heard the unmistakable rolling kerroooo of the sandhill crane, Grus canadensis, overhead.They were relatively low, and they were circling to wait for a trailing group of five to catch up.I zoomed in as much as I could, and I couldn't resist cropping just one crane all by itself.I've been folding origami since I was about nine or ten, and I always called the back of the origami crane the tail. Most crane-folding instructions call that part the tail also. It wasn't until I started seeing sandhill cranes that I realized those are really their trailing legs!

When it gets dark enough and cool enough to send us back indoors, I've been taking some time to try some of the braiding patterns from Mark Campbell's 1867 Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair-Work, which I downloaded from Google Books.Isn't he great? I love him to pieces. My braiding stand is not half so fancy, though.
I made mine using a sheet of thick white craft foam, a pencil, a compass, and a protractor. But it seems to work as well as Mr. Campbell's.

Now it's time to get outside in more of that sunshine!