Wound Tightly

Going To Seed

Portraits Of Autumn

Green Tomatoes

I really neglected my garden this year or if you look at it in a more positive light, I let it rest for a year.  Nonetheless, my annual crop of volunteer tomato plants cropped up again.  The late spring stunted their growth and they have just gotten to the point where they have little green tomatoes on them.  Whether they will ever ripen is still to be seen.

Moonflowers In The Rain

Lots Of Yellow & Green

Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

The majestic Monarch Butterfly has a very specific taste for special plants.  While as an adult butterfly it will feed at a number of flowers, its caterpillars need plants from the milkweed family to eat.  In Michigan we have a number of types of milkweed - common milkweed, swamp milkweed, and orange milkweed or "butterfly weed", pictured above.  The photo directly below shows an adult Monarch resting on a common milkweed leaf and the one below that shows a Monarch probing the flowers of a butterfly weed plant.

Late Summer Wildflowers

Emergence

Thistles

The thistles have begun to bloom this summer.  I have always liked these interesting plant that are both dangerous looking and beautiful at the same time.  I had to run to Home Depot on Waverly Road the other night and I stopped at Woldumar Nature Center for a few minutes.  A thunderstorm was brewing on the horizon and it had started to get dark pretty quickly, even thought it was only 5:30pm.  I snapped the few photos that I could as the heavy drops of rain that precede a downpour started to fall.  I fortuitously captured the photo below with the profile of the thistles against the darkening stormy skies, though I typically would not have taken a photo like this.  I made it safely back to the car right before the clouds opened up and the deluge began.

Summer Sunset Wildflowers

I really like the way the sunshine colors things this time of year around sunset.  It made for nice photographs of the wildflowers at Fenner Nature Center the other night.

Miscellaneous Fenner Forest Photos

Cattails

Fenner Flowers

Plenty of beautiful wildflowers are blooming around Fenner Nature Center this time of year.  The overcast skies last weekend kept most of the butterflies and dragonflies from buzzing around, so I snapped some photos of the flowers instead. 

Woodland Wildflowers

Summer Berries

The summer wild berry season has arrived in the Lower Peninsula, but appears a little slower in arriving up north.  I photographed these "black caps" at Fenner Nature Center a couple of days ago.  They just look so tempting, though most are not quite ripe at this point.