This plant goes from erupting to gestating seedpods in two weeks.

gardening: observing, planning, designing, and editing
This plant goes from erupting to gestating seedpods in two weeks.
It’s been just over a month since I spotted this year’s twinleaf. It probably came up a couple of days before I captured it.
Within a week, it was blooming!
The flowers do not last long.
These nascent seedpods will spend the next month or so maturing. Meanwhile, last year’s seeds have sprouted and the baby twinleaf plants are peeking out from under their parents’ leaves.
For now, we are in the only sober and serious phase this plant has: growing those seeds. If you look carefully, the swelling seedpods are hiding in the foliage.
As you walk by, there is no obvious activity.
It’s all very discreet, until the seedpods are ready to pop. That’s when twinleaf enters the botanically rare, but wonderful, silly phase.
Back on April 5, the twinleaf appeared.
Continue reading “Twenty Days From Budbreak to Seed-Setting”
The twinleaf has revealed its true self. It looks like a cigar-smoking little alien, doesn’t it? This is twinleaf at its silliest. How many plants can you say have a well-defined silly stage?
But this toothy stage is hard to catch—from the time the first pod pops until the last seed is gone is less than 24 hours. Here is a seedpod very carefully clipped and held so that you can see its full seediness. Continue reading “Twinleaf Revisited”
The twinleaf have reached their full summer size. Now it’s obvious why they are called twin leaf.
They are cooling to look at. The next big deal with these plants will be the seedpods. It will be soon—the cool weather has slowed them down—but I am not going to spoil the surprise.
It’s been just a few chilly, rainy days since my previous post on spring ephemera, and the changes are dramatic. Yesterday brought wet snowflakes that melted on contact; I’m hoping that was our April snowstorm. We did not get the 1–3 inches that the meteorologist postulated, but the ground is quite soggy. There will be no plant rearranging this weekend. Revisiting the same plant species as in the previous post, I find bigger plants and lots of flower buds. Continue reading “Spring Ephemera Are Changing Rapidly”