Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Second sight?


Ken Tucker of Rolling Stone reviewed The Royal Scam in 1976.  
Steely Dan's next album, Aja, was indeed a pop killer.

Second chance

Last year about this time, I spied one white flower standing out in a fallow field of green.  


Yesterday evening, I returned to the area because from a distance, I could see...


...and then I got closer.


There's just one plant this year, but it's the same drooping star-of-Bethlehem that I spotted on April 21, 2024.  The location data in my phone confirms it's the same place this year.  The red 11 and blue 6 were last year's images, and the other 9 were from last night. 
     

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Wildflower at sunset


Seen this evening in the same field that last summer held soybeans.  Henbit deadnettle is the tag Google gave it, and instead of linking to the usual "noxious weed" rundown, here's Blue Ridge Botanic with a much more complimentary description.  

Down it goes, too


Remember that red maple we planted on April 14?  Here's a good close look at it now.  Rabbits?  The missing parts were seemingly too tall for a rabbit to reach them.  But something nibbled them off.

Down it goes


At 8:00 this morning, work began on roof replacement of our next-door neighbor's house.  Good Cat Nora has her eyes on the workers as they strip away the 25-year-old shingles and roofing paper.

In bloom


For quite a few years, we've had a dogwood tree growing just at the near end of our driveway.  Like much of our landscaping, it just appeared one year and we let nature take its course.  

In 2019, we had landscapers work on the non-lawn portions of our yard, which we regretted.  Areas where they spread black mulch looked fine at first, but as the summer went along, the grass died alongside the mulched areas, as though the mulch had contained Roundup or some other powerful herbicide.  

A cherry tree declined to the point where only two limbs remained alive.  Next to the shed, a magnolia tree got sick and died.  The area containing the volunteer dogwood also suffered, but the tree remained alive, although several branches stopped producing leaves and were pruned last year.  This spring, it's looking better than it has since before the misbegotten mulching.