Well said! :D do you like growing plants? You should try growing a dragon fruit seed from a supermarket dragon fruit. I tried it, about a year and a half ago, I wrapped a dragon fruit seed in a wet paper towel and let it sprout. Then I planted it in cactus soil. This is it today, in a pot by my living room window. It gets a lot of light. I had to make those supports out of toothpicks to make it not grow sideways.
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Very slow growth, but growth nonetheless. It definitely started growing a lot more when I transferred it to this bigger pot in March.
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Wow! That is amazing! I wish I could say the same for myself, but pretty much anything I or my family tries to plant just dies, usually within a year or two. One of the few exceptions is our blackberry bushes, which we have to cut back every year because it grows so well, but it is nice to enjoy tart wild blackberries instead of nasty mushy store-bought berries!!
I actually only started developing an interest in plants a few months ago, because, when out iNatting, I mostly see animals if I try to find them. They are not EVERYWHERE you look, or at least, not that you can see. That makes animals a challenge, and not so much a “stop, take a photo of everything in a two-feet radius and move on”, as I felt with plants. Plants are just…everywhere, everywhere outside, you look, and you will find plants. And since I couldn’t ID almost any (Besides: that is an oak tree. And that is a maple tree? That is some kind of poisonous berry. Don’t eat it! That one has flowers!), I wasn’t very motivated. Indeed, my first plants were really mostly flowers, because they are pretty, and, in my opinion, easier to ID. I had quite the learning curve finding out the hard way that you often need leaf, stem, potentially flower photos all together to ID a plant. But now I try to take photos of more plants that are interesting, or unique, or new to me.
One such event was a sudden pique in my interest in clovers, after finding my first four-leafer on the 24th LAST YEAR!! at one of my fav hiking places. Today, I went there again, and found six more four-leafers (Which I proudly identified as white clovers, as opposed to the crimson clover which was my first) and a five-leafer!!! I can’t wait to upload them. I think that the fact that they are just so unusual is what sparked my interest. Hopefully I will get some pretty photos of their flowers in the summer!!
I apologize for getting off-topic. I just wanted to share. 
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Don’t apologize I enjoyed reading your story!! :) I think it’s great that you have an interest in plants, and I get what you mean about how animals you have to LOOK for whereas plants are everywhere. Honestly plants are what got me into nature at first, I was interested in the reproduction of gymnosperms and wrote a paper on it for my school newspaper. I became interested in flowers and then wrote another article about the relationships between plants and pollinators. Plants are cool but I must say that my interest in them has gone down quite a bit.
Six four-leafers AND a five-leafer?? You must be the luckiest person around haha. I wonder what would happen if you cross pollinated them when they flower.
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That would be exciting, if only I could find them again!! I’m thinking I found a hotspot, because I’ve never even seen them anywhere else!!
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My record is a seven-leafer, but those are rare as the proverbial hen’s teeth.
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Admitedly, most of my flower shots include the real intended subject: insect pollinators.
Or, those predators that hide, disguised, in the blooms.
Sometimes, it’s something after the plant itself, but it needs to be disguised.
Not sure on the ID of this cat navigating a coneflower (Echinacea) head, but my closest guess is Eupithecia miserulata (common eupithecia moth).
Sometimes a bloom can bring confusion.
Here’s a flower that’s fairly common in the older woods near me: Monotopa uniflora, a parasitic plant also known as ‘Ghost Pipes’. There are some colour variations too.
And then there are the ground crews. Like how ants help colonize the trilliums.
Alas, a quickly vanishing sight in my area (Southern Ontario, Canada). It takes many years for the colony reach these kind of numbers.
And speaking of numbers…
Anyone for dandelion math?
Or would you prefer more of a landscape?
Springtime beauty? How about…
Or…
Her ladyship’s footware?
Better stop.
Okay, one more. Wild Columbine. I see these along the cliff tops of the Niagara Escarpment in the spring. Graceful, elegant and in a way, discrete. But plainly beautiful.
[sigh] This isn’t doing much for restraining my wintertime longing for greenery, birds and bugs.
Though, flowers in the snow DO help. Like this one from December 7th, last year:
Lonicera fragrantissima (Winter Honeysuckle)
Okay, gotta go clear the snow off the car. Thanks for the chance to view reminders of what’s only… what? Two or three months away?
Cheers.
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In the dead of winter, in an especially cold winter, in Maine, I greatly appreciate those ephemerals.
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Wow, that is so pretty! Lilies are like my favorite flowers
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A part of my heart will forever remain with the spring desert flowers in Baikonur, Kazakhstan:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18632696
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/31923807
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/36259956
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/148006135
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41156599
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/69918068
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18627052
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Wow! So much variety! I would love to go to Kazakhstan sometime. You were there in spring. What was the temperature like then?
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How come I haven’t seen this thread before??
I have to think a bit more, but off the top of my head i have this Tragopogon porrifolius - like a mandala
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/21803260
two-coloured Tripodion tetraphyllum
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/265426054
and the desert-plant Apteranthes europaea
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The photographs were taken at various times, from the second ten days of April (iris, Gagea, small white tulip) to the end of May (Asteraceae, Persian rose). See the climate at Baikonur.
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Sorry for being so pedantic, but you’re calling a garden gladiolus an iris :)
