It was a rainy day today, but I spent the afternoon at the Delaware Nature Society’s Ashland Nature Center. Here are some lovely quotes I found there that seemed so appropriate for us:

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” John Muir

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” Albert Einstein

“A weed is a plant whose virtue is not yet known.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” William Shakespeare

And finally, this almost brought tears to my eyes:
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anais Nin

This native wood aster is very common in the woods around here. I transplanted this one from the wooded yard of a friend, and amazingly, it took!

In a previous post this spring, I included a picture of a Jack-in-the-Pulpit with some berries that I hoped would ripen this summer.  Here they are!  The leaves have died away, but the berries continued to ripen–aren’t they a gorgeous red? In reading about this flower, I discovered that a plant is either male or female and can change sex from year to year, depending on growing conditions the previous summer.  This was a female flower.  Also, the females have two sets of leaves while the males have only one, an easy way to tell the sexes apart. If it is a hard summer and the corm is unable to store much energy, the plant will come back in the spring as a male.  Then if that male plant has a really good summer, it can come back as a female the next year.  All Jack-in-the-Pulpits start out as males for the first year or two to allow the corm to grow. Interesting, huh?

This is Boltonia Asteroides, also known as Doll’s Daisy.  A butterfly attracter and a late-summer bloomer, I think it’s very well named because its blossoms look like shooting stars and just seem to be hanging in mid-air!

My yard is so quiet now except for the clatter of the cicadas and the tiny twitter of the ruby-throated hummingbirds as they visit my feeders to tank up before their migration south.  The bluebird family visits less and less frequently to indulge in my mealworms, and I noticed today that Mr. and Mrs. BB’s feathers are starting to look a little bedraggled. I hope they’ll be back next year!

On a more cheerful note, some of my late-summer flowers are blooming!  Besides my hoary skullcap, the cardinal flowers (lobelia cardinalis) are a bright crimson, and my blue lobelia (lobelia siphilitica) is very popular with the bumblebees.

The cardinal flowers and blue lobelia are favorites of the bees. Look closely and you might see a bee on the blue lobelia!

Blue lobelia up close.

A new flower I tried this year, nodding onion, has decided to bloom after it sat all summer doing nothing and I had about given up on it!

Nodding onion. It’s hard to get a good picture because it keeps nodding!

The bees are still all over the few remaining blossoms of my joe pye, which is pretty much finished for the year after a hot, dry spell.

Joe pye with bee. This patch was a-buzz all summer!

My pokeberry “tree”. Birds LOVE pokeberries, and I have been nurturing this one all summer. They’re finally starting to ripen.

I’m still waiting, somewhat impatiently, for my three varieties of goldenrod to bloom, but they just aren’t quite there yet.  A few more late-bloomers have yet to put on their show, and I’m really looking forward to seeing them–more later!