A visual chronicle of suburban NJ
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?
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?
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. 
I saw a bunch of red admiral butterflies! I think they were mating. Mostly they were zipping around way faster than my camera could catch them, but occasionally they’d rest on the ground near me for a minute or two.
(By “I saw a bunch” I mean “I saw more than one.” I’m not sure whether I saw two or twenty.)
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.
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.
Representatives of the Liberty Science Center, which is located about an hour away from us (in Jersey City), came out to Maplewood’s Green Day to give demonstrations on composting (among other things).
In order to compost, you need worms, right? So they brought some red wigglers along, and let the kids hold ‘em.
As you’d expect, the red wigglers wiggled a lot.
Because it was an educational science demonstration, they got into the science of how and why you need worms for composting.
There was even an anatomical model of the innards of an earthworm (shown above), which is quite honestly the thing that drew me over to the booth, because I am a giant nerd.
This concludes my coverage of Green Day! ‘Til next year.
As a former chemistry minor and present Person Who Is Attracted To Colorful Shiny Objects… I had to go check out this pH display.
pH stands for “potential Hydrogen,” and it’s basically (forgive me, chemists) an approximation of how many hydrogen ions are in a liquid. Lots of hydrogen ions = low pH = acidic; few hydrogen ions = high pH = basic/ alkaline.
This particular company (Pur2o) was trying to sell us on the idea that water should be BASIC, not neutral, and set up this display to prove how acidic most bottled water is, particularly compared to their own very alkaline water. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that they used phenol red as their pH indicator.) Several fairgoers were skeptical about the underlying concept of this.
This is my favorite photo from the day.
Rizzo, of Rizzo’s Reptile Discovery, brought some tiny turtles to show off at Maplewood’s Green Day!
I was lucky enough to nab this shot while he was standing still to answer a question from the guy standing in front of me; otherwise, he was bobbing all over the place. Neither this photo nor his website give any indication of what a fun performer he is/was.
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?
