Wildflowers
Today I learned that the scientific name for the 'Baby's breath' flower is Gypsophila1. I also learned why Grackles travel in packs2 but that's another essay. I've been trying desperately to stuff some new new words into my noggin. I figured some of the terrible song lyrics from the 80s I know would be pushed out trying to learn the formal names of plants.
For whatever reasons, the lyrics to Piano Man are seemingly more important than the word Gypsophila. It's not easy coming up for clever ryhmes for greek and latin plant and animal names even though the yard and birds more of my attention than Billy Joel. I started it because I kept asking the better half for the names of plants as I repetitively forgot them or got them confused.
This year I'm trying to participate in 'no mow' may and U added five pounds of wildflower seed to the yard. It's a mixed formulated for the southeast from Hancock Seed Co.3. Here's whats in it: Baby's Breath, Blanketflower, Bachelor's Buttons, Dwf Blue, California Poppy, Purple Coneflower, Lanceleaf Coreopsis, Scarlet Flax, Mixed Color Corn Poppy, Dames Rocket, Rocket Larkspur, Cosmos 'Sensation Mix', Black-Eyed Susan, Clasping Coneflower, Sweet William, Plains Coreopsis
I suppose the umpteen hundred episodes of Gardner's World 4 might of had an influence but I also wanted to cut back on the amount of lawn grass... mainly because I quit fighting it with the multitude of bags of pre-emergent and so on. We also had quite a bit of equipment through the yard dealing trees from Helene and renovations. The 'no mow' is nice. I keep waiting on my POA letter so I can go give the board an earful on the benefits. It's mostly just clover flower coming in and aside from the benefits to pollinators, it's great to help repair soil quality. Plus - I'm dealing with other things in the yard besides cranking up the machines.
We mixed in flowers with vegetable beds, we planted a new pollinator garden, we trimmed back the butterfly bush ( Buddleja5 - see I'm still using the slang ) and chaste tree ( Vitex agnus-castus6 ), and I swipped out a bunch of natural areas to add wildflower seed. It's nice just walking along your yard discovering flowers as they come in. It was minimal work, I just raked back the leaves and clears little areas to spread the seed and then kept em a little wet for a bit. And now I've got em coming up everywhere. I'm gonna walk around the yard and get some photos of them now.
Oh, I almost forgot... baby's breath. The name origins are mostly speculative but it's been floating around since the 1800s. The full name most florist use is G. paniculata G. elegans but the flower itself is useful in the production of photographic film, hemolytic reagents, soap, and shampoo. It's useful in absorbing boron. It's also used in liquer, ice cream, cheese, and a middle eastern dessert called Halva7.
We put up a new bird feeder and humingbird feeders too and I'll write that up seperately alongside the grackles, but I mention that because of a comment we got about bird watching and latin names from the better half's brother. He just reponded Pokémon to a text about it. We got the joke immediately because the whole plant and bird thing, especially learning the latin and greek names is a lot of some sorta infinite characters of a game. Pokémon8 has over 18,000 cards with over 200,000 distinct versions. There are around 12,000 species of birds but only 800 in our region and there are about 12,000 native species of plants.