Flower Salvage

I was at a local apple and pumpkin and cider stand recently, and they had a rack of sad-looking bedding plants greatly marked down; some perennials, some annuals.  Some had already clearly been affected by a hard frost.  I figured, for only a couple bucks, I’d take a chance on a yarrow with silvery foliage, and also something missing its tag that seems to be in the dianthus/carnation family.  When I got to the cash register, they threw them in for free!

The dianthus is inside, but the yarrow is outside since I thought I’d try to plant it next to our heated garage before the weather changed.  Or not; perhaps it will come inside too until the spring.  In the meantime, it’s an unexpected late fall bloom as I go in and out of our door.

This weekend’s weather is predicted to be unseasonably mild and even sunshiney one day.  Time to get out in the garden one last time!

Mystery Flower for Eye Candy Friday

I was in Madison, Wisconsin, for a meeting earlier this week. It was one of the last nice days of the fall, I suspect. At lunchtime, I went for a walk by Lake Mendota and found this flower which I’m not familiar with, which was still braving the end-of-October chilly weather.

Whatever it is, it’s lovely!  And very purple-pink.

Last Rose of the Year

Right before our 8 degrees below freezing night, a couple weeks ago.

Last Rose of Fall

Sigh.  It’s a long time before the earliest late March or early April bulbs bloom…

Apple of My Eye (Candy Friday)

Photo taken last Saturday.  After an intervening week of gloom and rain and snow,  it looks like this again today, with a sunny October-blue sky.

Mmmm, fresh crisp apples!  One of the best things about autumn here.

Painted Eye Candy

The Painted Daisies always make me think of early fall, though they’re supposed to be a midsummer flower, I read.  They’re almost done now and we’re finally just getting what I think of fall weather in the last week or two.

I asked my 11-year-old Gothlet to help me pick one of several Painted Daisy pics for the blog post, and she picked the most wild one, with daisy petals going every which way.   I should have known.  I was explaining ‘Dungeons and Dragons‘ to her the other day, and she immediately decided that if she were a character, she would either be ‘chaotic evil’ or ‘chaotic neutral’.  Probably the former….

So, here are your chaotic painted daisies for the day!  (I won’t speculate as to their alignment.)  Click if you want to see the details of how they are, as Lisa would remind me, ‘composite flowers’.

Morning Sun Eye Candy Friday

Morning sun on weed grass

Autumnal sun shining through dewy grass.

(Let us ignore the fact that those are weed grass seed heads and an overgrown lawn sorely in need of mowing, hmm?  Gracias!)

Dewy Eye Candy Friday

We have had day after day of cool, moist mornings, with fog and dew.  No rain till a few days ago, and today it will rain again, later.  (This is good, we need it.)

The dew makes my feet wet when I walk to my car or bike in the morning, but it’s lovely up close.

Serenity Eye Candy Friday from Camp

Because serenity has been pretty well lacking since I got back.  I need a reminder.  Sigh.

Little Boy Lake at dusk, above.

Nature’s Fireworks

From our trip to Florida, a dramatic evening where the theme park fireworks and Nature’s fireworks were going off simultaneously.

Very apropos for today,  as the storms are rolling in here, even as I post this.

I hope it doesn’t look like this tonight for the baseball game in our plans.

Oasis Eye Candy Friday

Not in the sense of desert, but in the sense of a place of calm, of sadly needed respite.

This was one of the areas tucked away around the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC.  We really wanted to stop at this museum, which is the newest national museum, but time did not allow, as we were walking quickly to an appointment with our Representative which had been arranged as part of the National History Day events.  But we walked through the National Mall side of the grounds, which were amazing.  This pond was tucked back by one of the markers for the cardinal directions (the building is aligned with the cardinal directions and also with the Capitol building).  And despite our time constraint, we all three paused for a moment here and just looked, and breathed, and listened, and were.

It was raining, but we didn’t mind.

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Click the thumbnails below to see the interesting architecture and landscaping in more detail, and here to read more about it.

I hope to go back and visit next time  –  and eat!  When we walked by and saw that it had a café, we wished we’d eaten there that day, too; the café serves “Native foods and contemporary cuisine with a Native American twist”.  Undoubtedly better than our Mall hot dogs in the rain, under siege by birds and a squirrel!