Tag: native wildflower

Secret Sidewalk: eight late-November wonders

As fall drifts toward winter, nature doesn’t slow down, not really. Amazing things happen all around us, all the time. This site’s tagline: “Everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss” includes not just “natural” areas, but our own yards, trash alleys, parking lots, roadsides. For example, our Secret Sidewalk …

The Secret Sidewalk is a shortcut through 3 neighborhood blocks, but rather than running along a street, it runs between homes. It’s a 5-foot-wide Metro right-of-way flanked by property lines, and it feels intimate, despite crossing four roads, and despite tall privacy fences. It takes walkers past a mix of cultivated and wild. Exotics, natives, volunteers, invasives: all here. Signs of the season change daily.

Continue reading “Secret Sidewalk: eight late-November wonders” →

Nashville’s Mustard

There are swaths of yellow right now in Elmington Park: small yellow blooms massed in the lawn. I hope the city doesn’t mow soon, because the yellow is Nashville mustard—our mustard—and it needs to go to seed and spread. I saw it on the way to Hebrew School, and as soon as I could, I went back and parked the car in the lot, then parked my body flat on the grass.

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Snowberry Clearwing Caterpillar

Snowberry Clearwing. Sounds like a unicorn name, doesn’t it?  But it’s a type of sphinx moth—Hemaris diffinis—and before it becomes a moth, it’s a caterpillar. The caterpillar even has a single “horn,” though fake (to scare predators) and situated on the rear (to confuse predators). Continue reading “Snowberry Clearwing Caterpillar” →

Couchville Cedar Glade 7/5/16

The day after July 4th is a let-down because of the firework tents. Fireworks are legal to sell in Wilson County, so that’s where we go to buy. Most of June, there’s a retail tent at each big intersection, as well as at intersections big only to folks who have to cross them every day. Till yesterday, the tents were lined with tables decked with patriotic skirting, and full of customers buying armloads of flammable goodies. Tax is figured on  solar calculator or iPad, depending on demographic of the seller. Continue reading “Couchville Cedar Glade 7/5/16” →

If You Like Wisteria

wisteria 21st
Wisteria floribunda at 2400 21st Ave. South

If you like wisteria,

If you can momentarily forget this is the exotic wisteria classed as invasive here,

If you need to lie on a blanket and see sky through cascades of blue-violet racemes,

and if allergies permit fragrance in Surround Sound,

go to the front lawn of the old Catholic Diocese on 21st Avenue South. Evening air intensifies the scent.

* Continue reading “If You Like Wisteria” →

Driveway-Crack Flowers: Evening Primrose

Evening primrose
Evening primrose

Today’s native flower pic is courtesy of our accidental driveway-crack garden. This Evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) was a volunteer rosette sprouting beneath the water barrel last summer, and now it is so tall I wonder if my bats might be swooping down to gulp the moths that pollinate it at night. Continue reading “Driveway-Crack Flowers: Evening Primrose” →