Lmst

Inside a California poppy
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer ##BloomScrolling #OurGarden #Orange

A close up of the heart of a California poppy ready to shed its petals looks like an orange bowl, with a tangled of ropey drying stamens at the bottom. It almost looks like a hydra waiting for something to fall down along the curve petals.

I've been complaining about my tomatoes not ripening, and suddenly I had so many tomatoes I had to donate them to the P-Patch community shares. Nice big fat dark heirlooms. What a problem!
#Gardening #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #AlmostAutumn

Thornapple
Datura fruit
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #AlmostAutumn #OurGarden

Split tone photograph in shades of siena and blue
A round prickly datura fruit looks like a fat hedgehog, hanging under the plant's leaves. The leaves are large, o)void, with undulating borders and nicely demarcated white veins. The fruit is attached to the thin main stem by a short recurved peduncle. The fruit is topped by a ruffled remnant of the sepals, almost like an Elizabethan collar. The point of view is at an angle looking down at the plant growing above a grass lawn.

Tiny perfect melon
#Photography #OurGarden #OurHouse #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #VeggieScrolling #EastCoastKin #PNW #AlmostAutumn

A shallow dark blue bowl holds some summer bounty: a couple of small green bell peppers, three dark red Japanese Black tomatoes, and a small, yellow cantaloupe with white netting nestled among the salad vegetables. You can see that the bowl is set on a corner of a dark green metal garden table, with a dark green armchair set behind it. You can see the dry lawn of our backyard under the table and chair

I am doing an experiment boosting this

The dog walk in the early morning gifts a few backlit roses. The roses are mostly quiescent due to the heat
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #BloomScrolling #MapleLeafNeighborhood #AlmostAutumn

A soft pink rose glows in the shadows as it is backlit by the early morning sun. It is a simple double rose, its outer petals curved back and catching the sun, its innertetals still curled inward and somewhat darker and shaded. It has a few dried stamens on its lower petals, looking like tiny seeds.

A bright pink single rose shines in the shade, backlit by an early morning sun. Its petals are lighter at the center, showing off the golden stamens and pistils clustered at the heart.

Fading hydrangea
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #BloomScrolling #AlmostAutumn

A close-up photo of blue mophead hydrangea panicles shows the sepals fading from blue to green and verdegris colors. The emphasis is on the intriguing shades of blue to pale blue to light green to dark green and then to a green-blue. It's both monochromatic and colorful.

This year's sniffing the zinnias pix.
The gardener here has a strip full of zinnias and dahlias (with some other flowers thrown in) along the sidewalk by her home. A yearly labor of love.
#Photography #Artsy #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer ##BloomScrolling #RavennaNeighborhood

A small gray dog is intently sniffing at the edge of a patch of pink, orange, yellow, and magenta zinnias. The patch is part of a sidewalk strip in front of a dedicated gardener's house. The photograph is processed to give it a watercolor effect.

Backlit datura bloom
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #BloomScrolling #OurGarden

A close up of a backlit datura flower, shows the green base glowing with sunlight, lighting the six white stamens with their oval, tan-yellow, wildly hairy looking anthers, as well as the long white pistil with its yellow tip. The visible portion of the white tubular corolla surrounding the heart expands into a billowy trumpet, with some dark shadows, perhaps like storm clouds. The image shows that corolla is lightly tinged with lavender at the very edges of the frame.

Our wild crabapple actually formed fruit! The flowers on the left are from this spring
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #OurGarden

A small cluster of 5 petaled crabapple blossoms glow white with tinges of pink. They are nestled in an array of green leaves. You can see other pink and white flower buds in the background. They are opening under a bright blue sky.Ghis is from April of this year.

August, 2025, and a couple of spring's blossoms have transmogrified to little red crabapples amid the green leaves. These look like miniature old-fashioned apples with white speckled and russet splotches. The lanceolate leaves are still bright green, although there are some spots where autumn has started the leaves' yellowing.

I'm feeling a drying up of photographic inspiration...need to look at a new direction somehow. Meanwhile, here's some nice moss from early summer perigrinations
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #RainyDays #Mosses ##Mosstodon

A nice stand of green haircap moss with red-brown sporophyte capsules atop red-brown stems growing above the leafy stems. The pointy moss leaves are very wet and almost translucent due to a rainy spell, and are arranged so that the stems are full of leaves.

Moss ID maybe incorrect, I didn't key it out.

Some orange
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #AlmostAutumn #BloomScrolling

A small orange pumpkin can been seen at the bottom of the photo, surrounded by huge rounded green pumpkin leaves. The vine is growing in a garden patch along an urban sidewalk, along with some other ground cover leaves and a spray of small lavender flowers.

A plant called Chinese lanterns grows in a sidewalk garden patch. It has small orange heart shaped lantern-like fruit. If you opened the "lantern" you could find a small berry. The lanterns are scattered among bright green foliage o tall stems. The lantern structure will decay later in the season, leaving a lacy cage of the remaining leaf veins for the red berry.

Small bright orange and yellow tropical milkweed flowers form a cluster at the top of a stem full of narrow green leaves. This species of milkweed is not recommended for butterfly gardens because it can harbor a Monarch butterfly parasite. But! Seattle isn't an area where Monarchs migrate or live, so it's okay here.

A brilliantly orange Winnie the Pooh dahlia has a circle of flamboyant yellow petals around its heart. The outside rim petals are also tipped with yellow. The simple flower is growing near a gray wooden fence, making it really pop. It's alone in a bed of leaves, and I assume more flowers will bloom later.

The ripening
Ready for bird migration season
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #BloomScrolling

A close up photo of a ripening sunflower
The heavy sunflower head full of ripening seeds bends over the sidewalk. The bright green, hairy and pointy sepals curve up to the sky. The rumpled, still bright yellow, aged petals bend downward, obscuring the heart full of seed still wrapped in the drying center flowers (remember! sunflowers are composed of many smaller flowers, the yellow petal flowers at the outside rim, the star-shaped seed bearers in the massive heart). The composite flower casts a black early morning shadow on the wall behind it. There are big, green, hairy heart-shaped sunflower leaves surrounding the flower.

Whales or birds?
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #RavennaNeighborhood

A garden entry gate sits between two white pillar gateposts topped with metallic caps. There are cement stairs flanked by a black handrail leading into a green garden. The gate itself is a brass arch with a black metal spray of arcs angling out from the bottom. There are bright brass figures attached to the gate, four on each side. They are strangely amorphous, and might be whale abstractions, or perhaps large birds such as geese. The two at the top might be tubular flowers with reflexed petals, sitting at the top of two of the black gate arcs as if on stems, and they seem to have black pistils exerted at the top. The abstractions are tantalizing. You wonder what sort of people live here, perhaps whimsical despite the simplicity and austerity of the stairs and handrail?

Tutsan ( a relative of St John's wort) is a popular garden shrub around here. It has indifferent yellow flowers in spring, followed by coral colored berries which glow against its dark green leaves. Its autumn colors can be spectacular.
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #MapleLeafNeighborhood

Coral colored tutsan berries, with their round shape against the oval opposite dark green leaves, look like a scattering of beads in a flower border. Here it's paired with pale green Autumn Joy serum. Later this summer and fall the combo will be lovely with shades of russet, red and gold.

Artsy flowers
#Photography #Artsy #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer

A coral and yellow begonia flower leans over the edge of a terra cottage flower pot. The pot is sitting on a gray painted wall corner below a porch. There are a few light green fern leaves casting shadows on the wall, both below and behind the flower pot. The whole scene is in dappled shade, and is coolly colorful.

A few small clusters of creamy white hydrangea flowers are set off by the dark green leaves. The largest cluster on the right is shading into almost all pastel pink, the one is the center is still white, and the one on the upper left is barely showing any pink. The whole image is processed to look like a silk drawing.

Late summer flowers in Maple Leaf Park prairie restoration
#Photography #NativePlants #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #NativePlantsOfThePNW

Bright goldenrod (Solidago lepida) has feathery panicles of small yellow daisy-like flowers on curved branches. The leaves are long, lanceolate and crowded on the flowering stem below the panicle. This goldenrod is a lovely sight in late summer amid the dry tan grasses.

Fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium) has tall spires of leafy stems topped by pink to purple flowers. Each flower contains 4 sepals, 4 petals, and 8 cream colored stamens, and a cute white pistil with four curlicues at the end. The leaves are long, lanceolate and rough textured. Large clumps of fireweed can give the effect of a purple haze in grassy prairies such as this one in Maple Leaf Park.

Another late summer flower in the grassy prairie in Maple Leaf Park, purple Douglas aster (Symphyotrichum subspicatum) is tall, full of long leaves and covered with lavender daisy-like flowers. The external petal flowers are lavender. The flowers in the heart start out red and turn into little gold star shaped cups as they open, The buds scattered throughout the shrubby plants open over several weeks.

Datura bud and blossom. The flower opens overnight and dies by early afternoon. It smells like dime store perfume.
#Photography #SeattleWashington #SeattleSummer #BloomScrolling