Mystery white and purple flower
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Category Archives: Color
Morrow’s Honeysuckle
Mystery purple flowers
Saw this at Elm Bank today but can’t identify it. Ideas, flowerophiles? Maybe it’s not wild and that’s why I can’t find it in the usual places. Look at the pollen on the petals…
Bonus mystery purple flower: some variety of violet with dark leaves, and a spur on the back of the blossom. At Ridge Hill today.
Japanese Barberry
I was excited to notice these beautiful little yellow flowers hiding on this thorny bush. Now I find out it’s another destructive invasive. It can form thick brambles that crowd out everything else. Red berries in winter. Origin: Japan. (Thanks to Alert Flowerophile Irit for wrangling Lucy while I took pictures.)
Japanese Barberry (Berberis thunbergii)
Wood Anemone
Saw a drift of these at Elm Bank. Lovely. Wood anemone have four to nine sepals. These have five. Native. Buttercup family.
Wood Anemone, Nightcaps (Anemone quinquefolia)
Japanese Silverberry
This is a large shrub native to eastern Asia, considered an invasive species here. The leaves are silvery in spring, but turn greener throughout the summer. The flowers are lightly fragrant. They’ll have red fruit that is edible (works well as a dried fruit) and has loads more antioxidant lycopene than tomatoes!
Japanese silverberry, Autumn-olive, Spreading oleaster (Elaeagnus umbellata)
Pussytoes
Later these blossoms open up, but at this stage they really look like the toes of a little white cat. I cannot find any information on why it’s also called Woman’s Tobacco. More on this later. Native.
Plantain-leaf Pussytoes, Woman’s Tobacco (Antennaria plantaginifolia)
Silver bell
Alert Flowerophile Donna is really on the ball here, spotting a bunch of these little trees at Centennial. They are full of these big white blossoms and I can’t believe I never noticed them in previous years. These are native to the U.S., but primarily occur in more southern regions (like South Carolina to Texas), so I don’t know if these might have wandered out from someone’s yard? They’re very striking.
Silver bell, Snowdrop tree (Halesia diptera)
Wild Red Columbine
These are so amazing looking, I decided to appreciate them with three pictures.This blooms in my yard every year. In all the time we’ve lived here (17 years), it’s never spread beyond this one little plant. Family: Buttercup (Ranunculaceae). Native. Flowers April to July.
Good fact from illinoiswildflowers.info: “Because the foliage is toxic, it is little bothered by mammalian herbivores.”
Wild Red Columbine, Rock Bells (Aquilegia canadensis)
Common Blue Violet (Lavender variety)
Another variety of violet emerges in my yard. I love their colors and their beautiful faces. The history here is that I got this from Dr. Whiteside’s garden in Illinois, who got it from his botany teacher who discovered it by a golf course in Rock Island, Illinois.
Common Blue Violet (Viola sororia)