Whilst Walking In My Backyard...

[Cygnwulf]

You have a beautiful yard, thank you for sharing the pictures.

[Sylverthorne]

I leave it to itself a lot; seems to be better for the local fauna if I leave them their cover and leaf-litter.

I do spend a reasonable amount of time trying to figure out what I have; and wishing I was a little faster with the camera for some of said fauna; I spotted a tiny butterfly that I couldn't get a good picture of, and I'd love to know what the heck it was. I see swallowtails, very rarely.. one of my long term projects is planting more native butterfly-friendly flora... 

There is a lot of purple hyacinth, daffodils, some iris and probably more I haven't found yet. 

 

I've seen chickadees, robins, owls (saw-whet, great horned), red-tailed hawks, a single peregrine falcon, and some variant of woodpecker...

... this guy, albeit this is the best of the really terrible photos I got of them.

 

And, of course, the hummingbirds, which I have not managed to get pictures of; maybe once I can set the feeder up for them... 

 

The immediate yard.. hm.  I do not have many recent pictures of that.

If y ou line these roughly side-by-side, you get my front yard, albeit this is while we had all that snow...

 

Most recent picture I have of the back includes the drilling rig we had in for the well-drilling, and, yes, it was as cold out as it looked:

... but a pretty dry, clear day for it. 

 

Much, much more recently, I spotted this little plant;

Which I seem to have a lot of, for all I have no idea what it is. It's happy as heck, though.

Google thinks it's winter purslane, or Miner's Lettuce; and edible. I'll probably double-check that before adding it to any salads, but .. that's kind of cool.

Edited May 24, 2022 by Sylverthorne

[Cygnwulf]

15 hours ago, Sylverthorne said:

The red head and neck makes me thing Red Breasted Sapsucker, but the banded wings are odd.  Could be just the angle though, and that'd be my gess right now.

[Sylverthorne]

I was out trying to clear up the .. terrace. . patio.. heck, I don't know what to call it, it's a concrete disaster site and about the only good thing is that it makes fantastic leaf-litter compost, and I got one of the rare clear views of our local hummingbirds. I remain not fast enough with the camera; ours seem to be green and brown, mostly..

 

I did notice, as I was coming back in from getting the mail, that the iris are blooming! Heck yes, they survived being squashed! Other than 'fancy', I have no idea what they are, but they are /happy/. I've never seen so many blooms on them.

 I seem to have at least two varieties; the darker one, I have a lot more of, but I'm happy to see them blooming so profligately.

 

I don't know this one; it's a flowering shrub of some kind, and seems to bloom before it leafs out. It's pretty, but holy balls, does it want to take everything over.

 

There's also a lot of sweet pea under it, not blooming yet. Nor the 'wild' climbing roses that I'm trying to get trained onto the fence, instead of sprawling all over and being a surprise barbed tripwire... That HURTS. I'd rather have them on the fence, deterring climbers.. >.>

And then.. all the random, unidentified stuff that's all over the place:

 

.. Like this. This is EVERYWHERE. I leave it until it stops blooming, because bees, but I have no idea what it IS.

Another one; kind of hidden in the taller grass and.. something the books tell me is a form of native plantain (that's the long, pointy veined leaves just visible to the right of the tiny flowers).

Not a forget-me-not, but danged if I know what it is..

 

.. and then there's this.

 

All in the front yard, which is going insane, without the chickens to keep things down. I'm going to have to take the scythe to it, once the blooms have gone down; for now, the bees are enjoying the wildflowers, and I'm inclined to let them.

 

If there are any typos, blame Mystery, who insisted on helping me write this post... by lying on my wrist-rest, drooling on my keyboard and purring contentedly. 

[Inarah]

I would call the irises "purple".  They're gorgeous.  The little white flowers look like a type of galium.  There's a tiny blue flower in that pic which is a type of speedwell. 

 

 

 

 

[Sylverthorne]

It's been. A time. The yard kind of exploded, as it will do, and I have gotten less wandering about done than I would like. Enough that I have random pictures of the stuff that I didn't plant, though; mostly on account of the yard exploding...

 

This, frex. It's TINY. I don't know what it is, but heck if there inn't a lot of it.

 

\

This is one of .. two? blooming shrub/tree things that I have no earthly clue WTF they are. It's pretty, though (and this one doesn't get all pointy in my general direction; the other one has thorns!). 

 

Not sure if this is buttercup, or some other Yellow Flower. There's a reasonable amount of it. I suspect the purple-tinged spikey-leafed thing in the background is Himalayan Blackberry, which... is invasive as hell, and a right pain in the *redacted*.

 

I think I missed the actual bloom of whatever this is, but it does leave an interesting.. whatever that is. 

 

\

Fern? Other plant? I have no idea. I noticed it and thought, Ah! Yes! I need pictures of that! And managed to get one or two that were actually decent.

 

.. I don't know if this is the same plant; I want to say yes, but I might be wrong.. it has been a couple of days.

 

So, that's the back eleven, or some of the front half. The weather's been alternating between 'Reasonable', and 'warm, but bucketing rain', so I've been Intermittantly Walking... as one does.

 

Oh! I spotted a yard-bunny! Might not be the same one, but hell, bunnies.

You guys like bunnies, right? 

 

The back yard is torn up pretty good right now; there's a trench going from the side of the house to the new wellhead, and the old wellhouse is GONE - all the way to dirt - and there are tread-marks from some kind of wrecking device (I didn't actually see any of it; they managed to show up while we were hiding from the lack of internet..  *sigh*), and it's kind of a mess. I need to take the scythe and knock down some of the taller grasses around the paths, so we can go to-and-from without getting wet feet. 

[Sylverthorne]

.. the corner laurel has somehow adopted a maple sapling. I found this yesterday, while wading through the yard to check on the fence roses (still not blooming) and the iris (EXPLODING) and the fennel (still there, somehow), and the lemon balm (all over hell; who thought planting a mint-like IN THE GROUND was a good idea.. at least it will smell Very Nice when inevitably mown down). 

 

This is both the only laurel not planted in a terrible place, AND the largest of the lot. So, how exactly a maple sapling managed to survive long enough to be almost as tall as the laurel I'm not entirely sure, but.. it's there. And it seems content to fight the laurel for space, light and water.

I'm honestly glad to see it; losing the other one did not make me happy. 

 

[Sylverthorne]

Before the day turned into supervising filtration install, I managed to catch this trio, having a nice snack around the new well head.

.. okay, only one easily identified, but if you look past Mama there, there are a pair of fawns..

[Chaoswolf]

Thank you for sharing your front/back yard with us. It is a moral boost for me. I'm not used to (or happy with) living in suburban hell with nothing but houses, buildings,  and people for miles on end.

[Sylverthorne]

If I ever have free time again, I need to get out there with the scythe; the grass is taller than I am in places. ..  at least.. I think that's grass. >.>

 

.. The FRONT! .. the laurel, and some of the baby maple .. 

 

The BACK! .. some of it, anyway. The trench got filled in, and I have a loose plot involving one of those 'wishing well' things and the wellhead; mostly to keep somebody from backing a Heavy Equipment over it.... I don't know which would be ruined by that, and I don't want to find out. So, cutesy yard sculpture.

 

The white rosebush growing on the 'garage', doin' it's thing. 

 

One of the roses planted next to the house; currently the only one blooming. It usually does its thing, and I leave it alone, other than dead-heading it.

 

This is a volunteer; and I'm not sure what it is. The blooms are about the size of your average penny, and it's pretty happy; hopefully this is a good enough picture that a search will tell me useful things.

 

Poppies! They pop up all over the place; last year they were by the apple tree, and not nearly as vivid.

 

 

Annnd the um... heck. I know what this is, but I can't remember. I think it's a brand of clematis, but I don't remember which. The hummingbirds are Really, REALLY into it, though.

Sadly, the drought got my actual honeysuckle. Didn't manage to kill this, though. 

 

 

[K2h2m3]

The small white unknown flowers are growing in the back of my apartment building in southeastern Massachusetts. Not sure what they are as I have never seen them here before. I have reason to believe they are domesticated flora. A tenant emptied a potted flower last year and this was growing in the same exact place plus a few others.

[Sylverthorne]

Google seems to think they're some kind of feverfew; related to chrysanthemums. That is possible, but I'm definitely no expert. ^^;

[Orlando_the_Technicoloured]

The shrub with the thorns and red flowers is probably a Japonica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaenomeles)

 

The one with the pray of yellow flowers may be a Laburnum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laburnum#:~:text=Laburnum%2C sometimes called golden chain,and Laburnum alpinum—alpine laburnum.)