Shepard Lane Garden

    I've been waiting for the thistles to bloom.  One of the first things that got me thinking about 'microclimate' was that our thistles weren't blooming yet - and they were elsewhere.  I looked at other things that are 'different' here on our side of Pea Ridge... and we really are one 'microclimate' away from the rest of the area.  Our Ipomoea Pendulata (woods dayblooming moonflower) is just about done - one or two blooms a day now, and the ones elsewhere are just rearing up.  Other places the Thistles are tall and purple, in our area, they are just emerging from the spiky balls they have been forming slowly over the past few weeks. Another just about to bloom and where they sat two weeks ago, when I noticed the very first flower heads beginning to emerge from the spiky nests of leaves And I'll leave you with the soft fuzzy part of the thistle - like a Dr. Seuss flower or the topknot on a fuzzy chick.  It is still amazing it can come out of all tha...

Sometimes, you've got to look twice.   There is something about this plant, and the way it emerges at this time (late July to early August, with many other butterfly plants) that made me take a second look at it today.  It looks inconspicuous, growing about a foot high on the side of the road among the grass.  The leaves reminded me of lespedeza, but the flower structure was more like baby's breath.  In days past, I would have just kept walking because it was a 'little flower'...(in fact one site called it 'green noise!' ) But - this morning, I noticed the little clusters of flowers were being visited by many small bluewing and white moths, and had many small bees and ants crawling near them.  I thought, there has to be more than meets the eye about this!   family Rubiaceae, also containing madder plants and coffee trees! best guess: Galium album, common bedstraw, heath bedstraw Galium is a very important pollinator plant in the life cycle of moths and but...

  The closest relative to this that I have found is Phlox amoena. The other possibility is Phlox paniculata .  It is a bit in between the two and it has been noted that Phlox varieties can cross and since each plant is both male and female, it can perpetuate in the crossed form in a wild place and be a little confusing! It is definitely in the phlox family, as it is a '5 merous' flower, merosity having to do with how many parts in a wheel.. (see website above for source).  The plant finder app I used originally wanted to call it something else - Hesperis matronalis , which is part of the Brassica family, but the flower on H. matronalis is only 4 merous, and it did not have the same sort of 'clusters' of flowers ready to open as this one did.   Phlox can also wander out of gardens, perhaps decades or a century ago, and grow on it's own in the wild.  This paticular set of plants is growing 'semi-wild' on the unmowed part of a roadside under some trees near ...

    These whipporwill peas originated in Mansfield, TN from an Etsy shop that popped up in 2012 and has since disappeared.  I don't have the lady's name anymore, but her first name was Barbara.  She called them 'brown speckled whipporwill peas', and told me they had been growing in the area for at least a century.   They are a type of the group of legumes called cowpeas.  I have been trying to keep the variety alive by growing it out every few years.  Although the 'purple-hull pea' is more popular around here, this item actually has a very long history and I actually find more success with keeping it as a mold-free dried seed than I have with the purple-hulls.  I consider it an important historical local food.  The best thing is it that grows well even in poor soil.   But, 2020 has been hard!  The weather has been so unpredictable, and I am hearing reports of slow maturity in everything.  Our tomatoes are finally starting ...