Welcome Back!

Purple Fringeless Orchid

Cardinal Flower

Senna

Arrowhead

Sleepy Orange

I'm back.  I know it's been awhile.  I have a lot of catching up to do, pretty much the entire month of July.  The One Thousand Flowers project has continued on, I just have gotten lazy regarding blogging about it.  And, of course, I have awesome excuses.  The heat in the middle of the month totally wiped me out.  Would get home from work and didn't want to do anything.  Time has been at a premium as well.  Most evenings when I get home I work on writing my sermon for the next Sunday.  I guess when it all boils down, perhaps I have had writer's block, or maybe whatever the opposite of writer's block is.  Writer's Over-stimulation?  So many things going through my head, my mind bouncing from one idea to the next.  The past month I have only taken the time to tame those ideas which were absolutely necessary, sermons.

Well anyways, I awoke this morning with the idea of a couple short trips on my day off.  Wanted to go down to Big Pine Road in Hocking County to see if I could get held at gun point again, and then also to Clear Creek Metro Park.  On the way I stopped at the magical moth gas station (there are always great moths stuck to the side of the building there!) at Clear Creek, filled up the bike, and suddenly came to the recollection that the Senna and Cardinal Flower at work were blooming.  Which meant I had to get busy photographing these or I might miss my chance.  The only place I knew to find both was at Hope Furnace in Vinton County, considerably farther than I was planning to go.

I am glad I went to Hope Furnace however, finding everything I was hoping to find as well as a couple of unexpected blessings.  Among the things I was hoping to find were the Senna, Arrowhead, and Cardinal Flower pictured above.  Hope Furnace is the only place I know to find all of these at the same time.  I also found the cute little Sleepy Orange, a butterfly that uses the Senna as a caterpillar host.  I routinely find Sleepy at Hope Furnace, one of the few places in Ohio where I routinely find this bug.  Sleepy is much more common in Arizona, where it feeds on Cassia couvesii, a common desert shrub.

My best unexpected blessing was the Purple Fringeless Orchid.  Some of the folks on the Flora of Ohio facebook page had been talking about this lately, having seen it at Lake Hope, which isn't far from Hope Furnace.  I always feel so strapped for time however, I really didn't have time or interest in exploring new territory, so I was very pleased to find this lone individual at the edge of the swamp.

It would seem a lot of the wildflower activity right now is swamp species.  This is something I want to study a little bit further, probably this winter.  That is, the phenology (blooming season) of habitats rather than individual species or plant families.  Early spring is primarily woodland species blooming.  Then we went through a woodland edge and open field species phase.  Now into a swamp species phase with a new round of field/prairie species coming on.

I will try to get caught up on some of the other adventures from the past month or so, although I may not advertise them on my facebook page.  In my idealistic world, month old news is not news at all, but somebody may find it interesting so bookmark the One Thousand Flowers blog and revisit occasionally.  Oh, at Big Pine today I did not get held at gun point again.  And plant wise, didn't find much either.  Kinda disappointing!  ;)

By the way, the current species count stands at 439.  I think 1000 species is probably rather unlikely, but that's ok.  I've never been good at setting goals!  I'll just keep plugging away, having fun, and hopefully educating at least a handful of folks along the way.