“The hepaticas are blooming… here are some of my favorite shots. :)”

From The Hepatica Gallery, posted by Karin Hankwitz on 4/15/2010 (4 items)

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April 10, 2010: One of my favorite harbingers of spring, Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), is blooming at Peninsula State Park.

You can find a beautiful little patch of it at the head of Hemlock Trail, which is a hiking trail just across the street from Weborg Point campground.

More info about Bloodroot HERE (wikipedia).

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Yeah, I am about 2 (3?) months late. :)

However, flowers are pricier this year, and I haven’t been able to get to the retailers to pick up what I’d like, anyway.

I’ve always wanted to grow plants from seeds, but had limited success over the years. And yet greenhouses do it every day! ;) So this must be an achievable thing. Practice makes perfect, right?

So I will have pots full of late-blooming plants this year. I’m going to plant my seed-started plants separately so I can bring them inside this fall and enjoy their full life cycle after the world turns to brown-and-gray, rather than losing them “early” in October.

The seeds I planted today included:

Giant Violet Zinnias
Thunbergia (black-eyed susan vine)
Balsam (not the tree!)
Profusion zinnias
Mixed sunflowers
Four o’clocks
Sweet Basil
……. and, Italian Oregano

I also have a couple packets of nasturtiums that I’m going to plant up at my Mom’s house… as well as some multi-colored Columbines for her yard, too. :) We love fragrant butterfly- and bird-friendly flowers. And unlike my deck, she doesn’t have bird predators (cats) to eat our little feathery friends.

With the exception of the Four O’Clocks, which as I understand are quite fragrant (and might end up up at Mom’s as a result if they attract too many moths and flutterbies), I have tried to pick flowers this year which are not attractive to hummingbirds particularly. One of my cats is quite adept at catching the little things, and she likes to bring them in the house and eat them on my bed.

YUCK!!!

Let me tell you, there is nothing quite as nauseating as discovering a little bird leg and 50 teeny-tiny feathers in a little pile on your bedspread.

Hopefully through better flower choices this year, I’ll attract fewer hummers (because it is very upsetting to me to know they are getting murdered on my porch) and then all the cat will have to dine on is cicada bugs. Yes, cicadas. In my bed. Headless.

*barf*

May 10, 2008, saw first blooms of:

• White Trillium (Trillium grandiflorum)
• Large-Flowered Bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora)

A few straggling Bloodroots (Sanguinaria canadensis) continue to bloom at the trailhead next to the old Weborg Cemetery (at Weborg Point).

The Forget-Me-Nots (Myosotis spp.) are barely poking their heads above the leaf cover, in clumps. Ditto for common grasses, which will flow over the forest floor like a lush green carpet; right now it is still mostly dead brown leaves with young clumps of grass poking through.

Some wise-cracker planted a few daffodils along Skyline Rd between Middle Road and Sven’s Bluff. Please rest assured that daffodils are not native ;) they were very much planted by some creative visitor …….

The Dwarf Lake Irises (Iris lacustris) are supposed to be blooming right now, but I didn’t see any sign of them at Weborg Marsh on Sunday May 11th. It has been an average of 10-15°F below normal most days this spring, so I expect the dwarf lake irises to follow the same pattern as other flowers thus far, and probably bloom sometime in late May. ##

Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend, and Peninsula was arguably chock-full of thousands of visitors… yet by some wonderful twist of fate, I had upper Skyline Trail completely to myself!! Well, unless you count the light rain, 3 deer, arguing wrens, whisper-quiet blue jay and perfect blue carpet of forget-me-nots. *wink*

The palette reminded me of my six weeks of summer camp at Treehaven… except that six weeks of forestry camp is not an exercise in spiritually uniting oneself with nature. Six weeks of camp is more like endless hours of tromping through tangled brush along unforgiving gridlines, pushing through no matter how crappy the weather, how bad your feet hurt, nor how desperately you need to pee. (The latter being much more an issue for us girls than it is for the boys)

But it looked like Treehaven, and reminded me of my fleeting romantic memories of how pretty it was there. (Sans the creepy ticks which rained upon us from the treetops. Ewwww.)

Flowers, pictured left to right:

Carpet Bugle (Ajuga reptans), Wood Betony (Stachys betonica), Dwarf Ginseng (Panax trifolius) – two pictures – including close-up of flower cluster, Gaywings (Polygala paucifolia), Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis), and Wild Honeysuckle (Rhododendron canescens) which smells divine but is all over the park!!!

I wasn’t able to get pics of the wildlife, since it was late afternoon and the light was low. Something about blowing kisses to a yearling doe and having her go from wigging out and scared, to totally relaxed and moseying about, that is just the coolest. How beautiful.

Peninsula is such a big park, so it sort of cracks me up how I end up focused on the smallest details. I drove out the other night thinking, “dang! I just spent the last hour looking at pinhead-sized flowers!” LOL! :D OK, they were a little bigger than pinheads, but not a lot.

My favorite moments are where I’m just chugging along and I glimpse something out the corner of my eye. My breath catches – I stop – and I carefully, quietly creeeeeeeeeeep backwards.

Such was the case with the mated pair of Common Mergansers on May 14th. I was tooling down Shore Rd. just below Eagle Bluff Lighthouse when I spied them near shore. They don’t like people, so I had to grab the shot quickly before they rushed off.

The mergies have been paired off since mid-April. In fact they arrived to Door County already paired up this year. In years past they have arrived in mixed flocks, but not in 2007. This year they were already cruising along two by two.

Anything purple catches my eye ;) and I was just tickled to catch these **EDIT** Dame’s Rocket (Hesperis matronalis) … see, I’d always thought these were phlox, but no! Turns out phlox has 5 petals, but Rocket spp. have only 4 petals on each flower. Rocket it is. Found these near the park superintendent’s house.

Watching new leaves pop from their buds on the birches and aspens was particularly gratuitous from the overlook above Nicolet Bay. From May 8th:

Look at that fresh, young, untouched and unspoiled green of those newly-fledged leaves! I was never aware of how many different shades of green there are, ’til the last couple weeks.

If you are anywhere in the vicinity of Peninsula State Park, take a quick drive in, to the area of Shore Road and Skyline Road. Turn right (up the hill) on Skyline.

The ground is carpeted — and I mean carpeted — with beautiful blue forget-me-nots. It is a cross between a magical fairy-land, and mystical clouds of blue… set off by this amazing bright young energetic green of freshly-sprouted leaves above and below.

It is, simply, breathtaking. Showing for a limited time!! Hurry!!!

The cherry trees bloomed early this year, May 10-15, 2007. As of today (May 16) most of the trees have passed their peak.

We had a bit of a double-whammy weather-wise on May 14th.

First, the weather was gorgeous throughout the day. Prevailing southwesterly winds pushed temps in southern Wisconsin near 90°… however at Peninsula State Park, the warmest I found it was 81°. 81 glorious, sunny, fabulous degrees. :D Interestingly, it was much cooler from Sister Bay-north. Ephraim was warm — 78° — but Sister Bay was a cool 64°, and it didn’t budge upward.

At Peninsula State Park, the ovenbirds (Seiurus aurocapillus) had arrived, their “teacher! teacher! teacher!” call echoing through the woods near Welcker’s Point and Tennison Bay Campground.

The forest floor was blanketed in forget-me-nots (Myosotis spp.) at Tennison Bay as well. It’s boggling how such a tiny flower can make such a beautiful effect. Periwinkle blue is so unexpected on the forest floor.

(Do you see the early spring bumble bee hard at work, in picture #2?)

Near the old site of Camp Meenahga, an odd shape caught my eye, poking up in the woods. Initially I thought they were cattails… but wait, upland? In well-drained soil under white cedars? No way! ;) I threw the car in reverse to have a better look. I was treated to early-season ferns, slowly unfurling their tender green shoots.

As I left the park, I was suspiciously eyed by a defiant male red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus), perched in a rare primo tree that overlooks the marsh.

…and then he chickened out (maybe he felt outmatched by the car?) and he flew off with a fuss.

Then the weather hit. In the evening, what I would guess was a secondary front passed through, bringing with it strong, very humid, very warm southwesterly winds. It had been in the low 60s at that point, with a reasonable dewpoint. In less than an hour, this amazing heat/moisture pump had jacked up the temperature to 82° and the dew point to 72° — between 10:30 and 11:30 PM!!!

This heat/moisture pump fueled lines of thunderstorms, which developed over Oconto County and moved eastward. As one line would pass over Door County, another was firing up across the bay. We listened to the thunder rumble for a couple hours before it ever arrived here. The light show from the lightning flashing in the clouds in the distance was, honestly, beautiful.

None of the storms were severe. On average most locations in the county received 0.20-0.40 inches of rain. There were no reports of wind damage nor hail. There was a lot of lightning with these lines, which made for a good show… but that was about it. ;)

The summer-like temps were short-lived. By the next morning, we were back in the 50s. This evening it is 45° with a stiff North wind at 19 MPH.

May arrived sunny and warm here in Door County. Hundreds of pristine white trilliums were blooming along Beach Road, just north of Sister Bay.