Supermarket garden

It’s almost summertime, which means… it’s time for suburbanites to buy garden plants from supermarkets!

All across New Jersey (and possibly the entire United States), plants in front of grocery stores are a common sight. I’m not sure whether most people buy these plants on impulse (“Let’s see, milk, bread, eggs… oh! They have petunias! I’ll get some petunias,”) or whether supermarkets are just known convenient sources (“We could really use some geraniums out here. Hey sweetie, next time you go to the A&P, could you pick up some geraniums?”).

Have you ever bought plants from a supermarket? Why or why not?

 

(FYI: I was standing in an obvious place [blocking the store entrance, in fact] and using that plant to frame my shot. I was NOT hiding behind a bush and taking sneaky paparazzi photos. Just to clarify.)

Crepuscular crucifers!

My best guess is that this is a wild radish; however, from the photos I’ve seen, wild radishes have widely-spaced petals that splay all over the place. These petals look too neat.

While it might not be a radish, it’s almost certainly something in the Brassicaceae family. Brassicaceae are also known as Cruciferae, which means “cross-shaped,” which refers to the four-petaled flowers.

What do you think?

Old blue eyes

I am visiting my parents this weekend, so for Mother’s Day, I had my mother choose from a few flower photos I’d taken. She liked this shot of a tiny blue flower. (Happy Mother’s Day!)

And then we couldn’t identify it. Her first idea was a forget-me-not, but forget-me-nots have five petals, and this has six.

A Google Image search pulled up a few other photos of this wildflower, usually with a caption like “I found a little purple flower, isn’t it pretty” or something equally useless.

Some searches later, I’m pretty sure it’s a blue-eyed grass! Blue-eyed grass is actually a rhizome related to irises, not a real grass. But it’s still a nifty little wildflower!

That seems like a funny name for a flower, though. Maybe the little stripey things on the petals look like the striations on an eyeball-iris, so they themselves look like blue eyes? And/or the resemblance to an eye-iris was a subtle pun on the flower’s relation to a flower-iris? Who knows?

Half blown

It’s time for those unconquerable dandelions to spread their seeds into your yard!

I am totally ripping off a better shot that I saw last week, but it was still fun to try my own version.

Hyacinths of grape

I’ve given you too many flowers in one week! I’m sorry. And this is a blurry photo, to boot. But grape hyacinths are pretty, right? Right? Work with me here.

Mayapple blossom!

The mayapples are in bloom!

I didn’t realize until I got home that mayapples (a.k.a. American mandrakes, or umbrella plants) are supposed to have SIX petals, not four with a space at the top. Whoops.

I forgot to actually take a photo of a mayapple plant (whoops again), so here’s one from Wikipedia, if you’re wondering what the heck a mayapple looks like:

Photo credit Valis55

I’ve seen them comprise a fairly thick ground cover, under the right growth conditions.

Pretty white flowers

Sometimes I just like to take pictures of pretty flowers. So sue me.

This might be an elderberry, but I’m not entirely sure. What do you think?

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This woman was searching for her dog (Percy) at Short Hills Park.

I really hope she found him.

Plums!

Happy Easter, if you celebrate! If you don’t, then Happy Day Before the Peeps and Chocolate Eggs All Go On Sale.

Although this photo was taken in Summit, these flowering trees are planted all over Manhattan too, and they’re all in beautiful full bloom right now. And I didn’t know what they were. My coworker called them “popcorn trees,” because the blossom heads look like balls of popcorn from a distance, but apparently real “popcorn trees” are Chinese tallow trees, which have long waxy chartreuse blooms, which are totally different.

After digging around the interwebs, I’m guessing that this is a wild plum (American plum), Prunus americana. It’s unfortunate that botanists haven’t accepted “popcorn tree” as an alternate name for this plant, though. Colloquially, an awful lot of people call it by that name; if you do a Google image search for “popcorn tree,” these white flowers are mostly what come up.

Growing gardens

I went to the Frelinghuysen Arboretum in Morristown this past weekend. I was expecting the arboretum to look like this, with cleanly manicured grounds and labels for all the plants and so forth. But no! Most of the site looks like a county park, with hiking trails and rivers and skunk cabbage and everything. It was an unexpected surprise!

…Incidentally, the website of the grounds is Arboretum Friends (Dot Org), which has nothing whatsoever to do with Happy Tree Friends.