August 4th: Some Coming, Some in Full Bloom, Some Going to Seed

A Queen Anne's Lace flower blooms on a background of the leaves of competing plants.

A pansy blooms.

A heath aster's flower forms a handsome centerpiece to this picture.

Pink clover seen on the lower left add color to this otherwise green picture.

The nimblewill grass is producing seed heads.

The prickly lettuce is forming a flower head.

Prickly lettuce leaves look rather like thistle, but the prickle is lacking.

Here one can see the flower head of the prickly lettuce blooming.

The scotch thistle has formed a bud, as clearly prickly as the rest of the plant.

A young ragweed is preparing to bloom.

Close-ups of the developing flowers show tight green flower heads with no evidence of color other then green. The sneezy misery this plant creates suggests that it depends on the wind to spread.

The evening primrose is producing the first of its bright yellow flowers. Developing buds diminish from those coming next into flower down to a tight inner cluster promising active blooming for several weeks to come.

The apparent cultivars have grown ascending leafy stems now developing the sort of tight inner cluster that promises future flowers.

The bindweed leaves show abundant signs of insect predation, and the previous flowers have left green developing seed cases.

Here is a young poke-weed berry cluster. At the tip are flower buds, further in there are wite flowers with green centers, and yet further back it can be plainly seen that the flower centers are the developing berries. These are still green, but it is apparent that the petals have given place to the berry, however small and green.

The horse weed is in bloom, with tiny, tightly held white flowers.

The plant is about four feet high, and produces a large cluster of flowers.

The younger prickly lettuce flower clusters are growing and gathering energy to explode into bloom.

The two neat leaf rosettes are putting forth the sort of stems that bear flowers.

The goldenrod is starting to bloom. Its brightly noticeable flowers earned it a bad rap as a prime perpetrator of allergic misery, while all  along the misery was meted out by the ragweed, the inconspicuous green flowers if which are the true culprit.

A black fly perches on an nimblewill leaf...

While one of the current dull orange ladybugs sits on the deeply lobed leaf of another plant.

A burdock flower blooms, held in a cup that is covered with the tiny hooks that will allow the burr to hitch a ride in the fall.

Meanwhile, the burdock blooms and fades. The plant itself is now doomed to fade into dried leaves. The flowers will become the dry, prickly burrs on which the future of this plant will now depend.