This Is Probably My Favorite Hellebore. Vigorous And Prolific With A Lovely Dark Purple Color. 

puya berteroniana

David Midgley

I learned that the fruit of the [mesquite] tree was one of many in our landscape that had evolved to be eaten by the giant mammals who disappeared from this continent not long after humans showed up, one of those factual nuggets that punctuate a truth about the deep history of the Anthropocene in ways reading alone cannot. […] [W]e will soon need to learn not to take for granted things like the wild food that goes uneaten due to the absence of the animals whose extinction our dominion coincided with.

I wonder what kind of cake we will make, if we have to make it from the fruit of the old tree that grew up in the brownfield.

Christopher Brown, A Natural History of Vacant Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places (2024)

Ragwort

Malva

My morning glory doesn’t like the wind chime

na bachlóga

the buds

nytimes.com

Opinion | To Save Life on Earth, Bring Back Taxonomy

Naming species has been a victim of a broad shift in our scientific priorities. But we need it more than ever.

The consequences of allowing taxonomy to falter are significant. Every year, botanists around the world discover around 2,000 new plants, a number that has held fairly steady since 1995, suggesting that there are still tens of thousands of plants to introduce to science. Three-fourths of the new species are already threatened with extinction. If we don’t have taxonomists to describe these species, we stand little chance of saving them — or their habitat.

With the threats of climate change, nuclear war and artificial intelligence bearing down, the act of simply itemizing our plants can seem trivial. But when I asked Art Gilman, a botanist, taxonomist and author of “The New Flora of Vermont,” why it matters, he paused in the careful way of a scientist. He gave no answer about curing cancer or revolutionizing food systems. “We lose the opportunity to know our world,” he said, finally.

Erica pyramidalis, the pyramid heath, was a species of Erica (also sometimes known as heath/heather) that was endemic to the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Erica is a genus of roughly 857 species of flowering plants in the family Ericaceae. The Pyramid Heath was restricted to what today is the city of Cape Town in the Western Cape Province, South Africa.The species disappeared due to the destruction of its habitat by the expanding city, and, despite the fact that the species was even cultivated for some time it is now considered extinct.

FINALLY the buttonbush pictures. These are just about the coolest flowers in the world. And they grow all over the riverbanks and are swarmed with pollinators right now it’s amazing. My mom and I couldn’t canoe 10 feet without spotting another one and of course we couldn’t not check out every single one.

Birders: do you ever wonder if this happens?

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