Wildflower Wednesday & My First Photo Capture of a Butterfly!

Many thanks to Gail at Clay and Limestone for hosting Wildflower Wednesday. 

My quest to the lake to find more wildflower offerings was cut short by a sudden downpour - so I'm sharing bits and pieces from the last five days. 

Still getting used to the camera and feel I need to get a proper textbook or something - anyway, if everything was easy I suppose, there'd be no sense of accomplishment. 

One bit of excitement was having the camera in my hands when the Monarch happened by - they're doing what butterflies do at the moment - fluttering in twos over my head and rolling on the grass.  This creature looks a little worse for wear with a pinched wing - didn't seem to impede his flight though.  And it brings me to one of my favourite wildflowers in my garden - the Fall Aster.  The seed flew into the garden on the wind and has taken up a happy residence.  I cut it back by a third (so this is actually a wildflower that is being domesticated) in the spring.  It's stopped flopping and will be completely covered in purple blossoms in the weeks to come.

Here is one of its paler cousins - note its natural form - tall and floppy.  Its natural habitat is usually dry scrubby areas.  You can see from the company it is keeping, it's in quite a wet location.

I don't know if I'm breaking the rules by showing the seeds rather than the flowers - but couldn't resist.  These are the seeds of False Solomon's Seal Smilacina racemosa combined with some garden Hosta.  It's a great shock of red in the middle of the tired old chartreuse leaves.

And if you break the rules once, might as well just keep on going.  Here are the little birdnests that are left over from the Queen Anne's Lace.

And what post about wildflowers in this neck of the woods would be complete without Goldenrod.  I've left a small patch under the Tsuga because I like the way the flowers mimick the needles of the hemlock.

And as we all know, if you've got golden rod here, you've got it there.  Every spring I think I've figured out what the phlox is and what the golden rod is and think I've managed to pull out the offending wildflower.  And every fall, I'm sort of glad, I haven't been successful.

And just to show how much I like this bright yellow treasure, here's a fancy Lilliputian version called 'Little Lemon'.  It's about 30cm or a foot high - and so very, very cute!  Just one of the many plants I have in my garden that has its roots in the wild.