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I love plants. You do too, whether you’re in touch with your vegephilia or not. Everything you eat or smoke and practically everything you drape on your body or put in your car to make it go derives directoy or indirectly from the vegetable kingdom. Plants are part and parcel of our environment. In fact, [...]

Way back when I started my Anti-Global Warming Big Year I decided that if I flew somewhere and stayed there for more than a couple of days I could count the birds I saw there provided I offsetted the carbon that the flight produced.  So I counted a bunch of birds in California that I [...]

When I was upstate this past weekend my Aunt Bonnie mentioned that she had come across a couple Jack in the Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) in the woods near her house. I was intrigued as it had been years since I had seen one and they are such cool-looking plants, named for their likeness to [...]

This year, like most years, my father planted some Moonflowers (Ipomoea alba), hoping they would grow up the cedar trellises, built by my late grandfather, that stand against the railing on my folks’ back porch. And, unlike most years, he’s had a bumper crop of the giant, fragrant, nocturnal blossoms, topping out at 15 [...]

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriacea) is an easily recognizable plant with a range that encompasses virtually all of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. It is one of over 140 species of milkweed, the genus Asclepias. Its common name comes from the white fluid released when the plant is harmed, and the scientific name derives [...]

Clattinger Farm (Wiltshire Wildlife Trust Reserve)
April 2007
Green-winged Orchids are named for the broad greenish veins that mark the sepals and appear most years at the end of April, flowering through to early June (though these particular plants flowered in mid-April: April 2007 was both the driest and warmest ever recorded in the UK). Dependent [...]

Fly Orchid Orchis insectifera, Bee Orchid Orchis apifera, and Fly x Bee hybrids
Somerset and Hampshire, UK. June 2005 and 2006
 
Fly Orchids are rather slender plants found typically in the Beech woods of Kent and Surrey, and less often in dry grassland and scrub on calcareous soils. Locally common in southern England and on Anglesey [...]