🍄Ipsissimus🍁Mocata🍄

Thank you! I can’t wait for the Pacific tree frogs to start seeking shelter under my loose bark.

An informative plaque shows what happens to a tree after it dies, in a process called “The Snag Cycle”. It begins with a freshly deceased tree (“The snag”), followed by “Bark falling off”, then “Snag breaking down”, “The snag has fallen”, and finally, “The stump”.

As of yesterday, I have officially reached the “Breaking Down” stage of the Snag Cycle. Yay for 40, I guess?

I always called them Otter Pops regardless of if they’re off-brand. The secret is that the knock-off “Helados Fun Pops” version is WAY better than the real name brand. Superior flavors, and they melt into a more satisfying slushy texture compared to real Otter Pops, which melt more like a popsicle.

A honeybee perches on the black disc florets of a “Midnight Rouge” sunflower. Its ray florets are burgundy red with a proximal burst of golden yellow.

Pollinator time out in the garden. I know it’s a rare thing for me to be posting something cultivated, but with a bloom like that, I couldn’t resist.

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Same here! I always love monotypic stuff, especially when it’s family level or above. Whenever I see one, it’s like “Hell yeah — you keep doing your own thing, ya little weirdo!”.

It’s the only member of Paeoniaceae in my area, so the first time I saw one, the weird morphology really threw me for a loop! According to this paper, it’s primarily pollinated by wasps, Syrphid flies, and sweat bees, although I did see a fat bumblebee rather awkwardly clinging upsidedown to one.

Against a background of dried Pinus ponderosa needles and a few incised, celadon-green leaves from the plant itself, is the upturned flower of a Western Peony. It has eight petals which fade in color from white proximally, to brick red centrally, to a dull, faintly greenish yellow distally. At the center of the flower is a ring of a dozen or so little green lines with three large, green, almond-shaped carpels emerging from the center of them. If that wasn’t enough, it finally takes thing completely over the top by having a profusion of dozens of bright yellow stamens shooting out in a ring around the outside of the lobes.

Paeonia brownii. These native peonies have such striking flowers, yet they can be easy to miss while walking down a trail, as the flowers face downward, showing only hints of burgundy petals from the side. If you you flip them over like this, however, they are quite a sight to behold!

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Against a background of Quercus chrysolepis debris is an “early morel”, which isn’t truly a proper morel at all, as its cap is freely connected. The pileus is brown, campanulate, not wrinkled like a true morel, and is relatively small in proportion to its long, thick, cream-colored stipe.

A fungal flashback from earlier in the year: Verpa conica, a not-quite-a-morel in Morchellaceae.

Quit giggling at the back of the class — it looks like a daikon radish wearing a cloche and *certainly* not like anything else.

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Two clusters of solid golden yellow plants consisting only of stems and flowers against a background of dry grass. Each highly glandular pedicel ends in a narrow, downward-curving, trumpet-shaped flower. Like most plants in Orobanchaceae, these are parasites. Their lack of chlorophyll (or even any leaves at all!) is the big clue there — I mean, if they aren’t photosynthesizing, they’ve got to be getting their energy from *somewhere*, right? In this particular case, they predominantly parasitize Eriodictyon or Phacelia, and given that these were all growing in the vicinity of big stands of Eriodictyon californicum, that isn't a big surprise.

Aphyllon franciscanum.
I’ve been wanting to see these golden weirdos for a while now and I lucked out and found multiple clusters in the same ultramafic hillside where I saw the Brodiaea sierrae, as they’ve also adapted to handle the harsh, nutrient-poor conditions of serpentine soil.

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YouTube video by TheNewEvesVEVO The New Eves - Highway Man

Been enjoying the debut release by The New Eves quite a bit. A blend of post-punk and English folk revival that reminds me at times of ‘Furia’ by The Fates, the short-lived group started by Una Baines of The Fall.

Bonus points for the descending “Holiday in Cambodia”-inspired riff on this track:
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Horrifying.

(This and the next few posts are presented with apologies to those who follow me elsewhere for being repeats, as I’m slowly trying to catch this place back up since my absence here!)

A lovely white flower with five petals, the topmost of which has a prominent yellow patch at its center. The stamens and style are both heavily exserted.

Rhododendron occidentale. A ubiquitous shrub of Pacific forests, it may not have the giant blooms of its cultivated cousins, but it more than makes up for it by having one of the most divine scents you’ll ever encounter in the woods. You’ll smell it before you even see it yards down the trail!

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Happy International Cat Day from this ridiculous beast.

Sleazy as hell, but aesthetically my sort of sleaze. Definitely passes my “EW Test” (whether or not a horror/exploitation film looks like something that the members of Electric Wizard would have playing muted on a TV somewhere in room while rehearsing).

A close-up of the ear of a grey tabby cat which is backlit by a ray of sunlight shining through the window of an otherwise dark room.

Someone found a sunbeam.

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An 8×10” ink & watercolor illustration of the inflorescence of Brodiaea sierrae. The flower consists of a magenta-purple perianth with six narrow tepals, a central column of closely-spaced white stamenodes with bent tips, and yellow reproductive junk in the middle. It is isolated against a simple abstract background consisting of splotches of green with a few spatters of yellow and tan, vignetted darker at the corners. It was made with a 0.30mm Micron pen and watercolors (a hodgepodge of brands–Winsor & Newton, Grumbacher, and a few Sennelier) on Baohong cold pressed paper.

Okay, last pic of Brodiaea sierrae, I swear! This time, however, it’s my attempt to immortalize it through my rusty and questionable ink & watercolor skills. Remind me next time to not to wait until the last day to try to make something like this for a gift, especially when I’m so out of practice.

Jokes on you: any time you deem my puns to be that terrible, owl just take it as a compliment.

Jesus Christ, is the Village Diner holding his family hostage or something? Hooo did this to him?

I’m not sure what I love more—the terrified-looking owl waiter or the parking lot palimpsest.

Never seen one on a Plantago before, how cool! My childhood home would get big patches of “not quite dandelions” (I’m guessing now that they were Leontodons?) and it would be rare to find any that *didn’t* have a stem gall!

Unfortunately no ID for your Plantago, but this is still a neat resource:

Against the dark background of an early evening landscape consisting of dried grasses, the orbicular sage-green leaves and rusty-red stems of Arctostaphylos viscida, and the distant silhouettes of Hesperocyparis macnabiana, is a large Brodiaea sierrae. It has one flower at full anthesis (six narrow, purple, recurved tepals with a greenish abaxial central stripe, arranged is a vase shape) and seven unopened buds (striped green and cream), arranged in an umbel. Its stem is sinuously curved and the top ~8cm is swollen by ~8–10mm from the gall of a species of midge so new and understudied that it doesn’t even have a name yet.

Brodiaea sierrae again, but with a little something extra—a mystery gall on its stem. From what I’ve read, this is formed by an undescribed species (!) of midge in the genus Lasioptera that seems to have a preference for Brodiaeoideae.

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I’ll bet if you read the fine print that it’s somehow connected to the business that was doing the Lorena Bobbit psychic readings from the other ad.

“One suction” has the unsettling implication that it somehow accomplishes the deed in one fell swoop, which honestly sounds kind of terrifying. I feel like there are active dismemberment lawsuits for this device.

What a fluffy little angel! Looks like something in the tiger moth family; likely the sort that are equally cute ”wooly bear"-type caterpillars when younger.

Against the mottled background of a serpentine outcropping is the inflorescence of Brodiaea sierrae, a member of the Brodiaeoideae subfamily of Asparagaceae. Well, according to AGP IV, at least—Jepson still calls the subfamily Themidaceae. I prefer the former due to the novelty of having to say a word with five vowels in a row. It has three narrow, linear petals and three sepals, all of which are on the magenta side of lilac. At the center of the corolla are three white stamenodes, spaced tightly enough that they are almost (but not quite!) touching each other, and each are bent at a jaunty angle a few millimeters from their apeces. Within those can be seen three anthers and a stigma, all of which are lemon yellow with a bit of white.

Brodiaea sierrae, a rare plant with limited distribution which occurs only in four counties in northern California and nowhere else in the world. Formerly considered B. californica, but it turns out that it’s not only a different species, but actually more closely related to B. leptandra.

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YouTube video by Christian Mistress - Topic Possession

For some of the more doom-inclined among you, this genus may look familiar due to it being featured in the artwork of Christian Mistress’ 2011 album ‘Possession’. I’m assuming the ones on the cover art are probably A. caudatum from their heavily filiform sepal apeces:

Against a background of forest floor debris (mostly dead Quercus kelloggii leaves and Pinus ponderosus needles) is the flower of Asarum hartwegii—a California endemic commonly known as Hartweg’s wild ginger due to the scent of its foliage, but bearing no relation to actual ginger, which is a monocot. The flower consists of three brownish-burgundy colored sepals which are triangular with filiform-attenuate apices, faintly striated, and HEAVILY hirsute. And the stems are somehow even hairier!

Asarum hartwegii. What a fuzzy weirdo! (Yes, I know... “turn on your monitor”) Here in California, Aristolochiaceae only has a few species of Asarum and one equally weird Aristolochia, but there are hundreds more species in the tropics.

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Reggie is iconic and I love him, but Rocky is just 10× cooler and totally steals the show from him in III. Easily the best Phantasm character outside of The Tall Man himself.

A lateral view of Diplacus angustatus. The yellow patch from the previous photo shows fine hairs; possibly the site of a nectary? The calyx tube is distally a duller magenta than the lobes and is green proximal to the calyx. The pedicel (not even seen here) is rudimentary and the whole dang plant is nearly acaulescent; just a showy little trumpet-shaped flower emerging from a ground-level calyx surrounded by narrow leaves, the latter being the source of its species name.

I mean, look closely from the side view—that’s not even a pedicel, it’s the corolla tube of the flower! The calyx is down in the basal leaves! Probably only a few millimeters of stem down in there, if even that.

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