Wednesday, June 3, 2009

What’s blooming this week on the hill?

The daylilies are starting to bloom. Daylilies are of special historical interest here at Kalorama. The second owner of the property, Mr. Nathan Bolton, was a journalist by profession but had a real passion for daylilies, known botanically as Hemerocallis. He did quite a bit of breeding work with them, and named and registered three varieties with the American Hemerocallis Society. As far as I know, there are no pictures of the three, but there are descriptions in the AHS database. His first introductions were in 1951. One was named “Baron de Bastrop” and terminology describes it as Orange-Red Dark, solid in color. The other entry that year was “Mary’s Old Rose” described as a medium red with some sort of splotch, stripe, or other color variation that involves all petals. In 1953, he introduced a medium yellow named “Mary Bolton,” (his wife) that was listed as an evergreen early season re-bloomer. Possibly this would be an ancestor to the popular “Stella d’Oro” that is so common in landscapes today. Based on those descriptions, if the daylilies blooming right now include any of his introductions, the one pictured here is most likely “Mary’s Old Rose.”



As long as I am featuring one non-native plant, I might as well include another. Several years ago, the late Virginia DeForest, a great plantswoman who happened to live up the road from me gave me a bulb division off of her Clivia plant. Clivia is surely one of the most elegant tropical plants around. It can be contrary when divided, and neither of us expected it to bloom the first year. I got it a fine Italian clay pot, because they like to get pot bound and live in the same pot for many years. Much to my surprise, it did bloom that first year and every year since. This last year, it sprouted lots of new bulbs from the base, and has now rewarded us with two bloom spikes.


The big showy wildflower that is added to the list of things blooming over the past month is giant coneflower. This plant has lovely large silvery leaves that look like collards or cabbage when they first come up. They send up a flower stalk that can grow well beyond six feet. The plant, Rudbeckia maxima, is native to western Louisiana and eastern Texas.


And, the last item, though fruiting instead of flowering, is a turtle; a red-eared slider to be exact. I have been seeing these girls traipsing around the top of the hill for several weeks. Unfortunately, there are also lots of them squished in the roadways around here. They are the most common freshwater turtles in the state. They are the ones you see sunning themselves on logs in ponds, creeks, and bayous. The females come up to dry ground, dig a hole, and deposit their eggs. They will bury the eggs and head back to the pond they came from. Eventually, if the eggs survive marauding raccoons, possums, felines, canines, and snakes, the baby turtles will hatch and head back to the pond where momma lives. A turtle about the business of egg laying is an easy target for the camera, so I got lots of good close-ups of the action.


The tiny red patch behind the eye is where the term red-eared comes from.















This is where the action is. She has crawled nearly a quarter of a mile up the hill from the pond, and still has enough water under her shell to generate mud to pack around the eggs. The tiny green flecks on her shell are duckweed plants. This was a fairly large slider. Field guides stated they grow to 11” in length. She was every bit that if not more.

1 comment:

Ben said...

Loved the turtle pics. Discovery channel quality with better explanations.