Today is Winter Flowers Day. So what kind of flowers do we have blooming right now?
Well, the peacocks are prancing around with flowery looking feathers. Does that count?
No, I guess not. Well, how about something that started as flowers? Like the red berries on evergreen bushes?
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Okay, okay, berries aren’t flowers any more. Well, sad to say, even my Lenten Rose is drooping in the cold weather, and no blooms there either!
So that leaves only ONE thing around here that still has a few blooms on it. . . the Camellia bush. Right before Thanksgiving it was in peak bloom:
However, we’ve had hard frosts since then, and only a few blooms are still hanging on.
So that’s it, for Winter Flowers Day we have only a few ragged-looking blooms left on the Camellia bush.
Happy Winter Flowers Day anyway!
Every year around the last part of October my Camellia oleifera ‘Winter’s Star’ starts blooming.
I especially enjoy this because:
There aren’t many blooms yet, so the bush doesn’t look too impressive. Maybe later!
I love Joe Pye Weed. It’s got such lovely soft pink flowers. And although I like to look at them, what is REALLY great is those flowers are veritable butterfly magnets.
They are especially popular with the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies.
I think it’s interesting that there are three color variants of the Easter Tiger Swallowtail. The male is yellow, and he’s just a tiny bit less showy than the females, as he only has small red and blue spots on the inside of his hind wings, up next to the abdomen.
I think this is a male (I’m not an expert here!).
The male comes in only the one color… yellow.
The females can be yellow too, but have an area of blue between the black margin of the hind wing, and the yellow.
So I would say these are female swallowtails!
This one is definitely a female with those prominent blue spots!
But here’s the thing… remember I said there are three color variants? Well, the female Eastern Swallowtail butterfly also has a black form.
So if it’s black, it’s female. If it’s yellow, it could be male OR female.
Whether they’re black or yellow, male or female, they’re beautiful!
At least The Farmer did get ONE field mowed before the tractor broke down. And the interesting thing is that somehow, there was one lonesome sunflower growing in that pasture.
We don’t know how this one little sunflower got there. I suppose a bird dropped it from one end or the other.
What’s more amazing is that it managed to grow amidst all the tall grass! I thought it was kind of cool to see it there.
Unfortunately, it seems removing all the tall grass around it contributed to the sunflower’s demise. All the surrounding vegetation kept it from being noticed, I guess, cause the next day it was broken off at the bottom, like something cut or chewed it.
No more sunflower.
Today it’s raining, but yesterday I took some pictures of a few of the flowers blooming around here right now.
Our trumpet vine is slow to break dormacy, but once it starts blooming it keeps it up for a long time.
We have a volunteer Mimosa tree in bloom also. We didn’t plant it, so I guess the seed just floated in from another tree. Or got deposited in bird droppings. At any rate, I guess a volunteer tree is a good thing in the Volunteer State of Tennessee.
There’s another picture of the same tree over on Anna Creates, which has a more dramatic looking black background. (It’s also usable for making note cards if you’re so inclined.)
The butterfly bushes are also starting to bloom now, and like the trumpet vine, they will continue to bloom for a long time.
We have some different colored butterfly bushes, like red, and bi-colored, but this just happens to be the one I was looking at yesterday.
The daylilies have been blooming for some time now.
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And to add a different color, the hydrangea has blue blooms…
And though these aren’t blooms, it’s fun to see the little figs starting to grow on the Brown Turkey Fig tree.
There are all sorts of things growing now around the farm!