Start of Friday Foliage, Flowers and Fruits photog

So, working on this organization and discipline thing with the blog (as usual) that will hopefully provide good content, learning for you and me, interesting dialogue and updates on my garden as well as assuring a good amount of photographs, consistently.

Here's the plan, feel free to comment and tell me if you think this is a good/bad idea:

-MONDAYs: Going ons in my garden
-TUESDAYs: Plant spotlight either in my garden, or of one of my interest
-WEDNESDAYs: Plant/nature poetry, sorry, need to get that creative urge out.  If it's painful for you, skip this day
-THURSDAYs: Horticulture lesson, for my sake, I want to understand all those fun terms like pinnate leaves and crap
-FRIDAYs: Foliage, flowers and fruit photographs in excess for your weekend viewing pleasure (I hope)

So, I guess here's to kicking off my new Friday tradition!

The ornamental Black Pearl pepper is fruiting and looking gorgeous!

I'd like to call this pic, jestingly, "Spicy hot pic of myself"  If you click on the pic, you can see clearer the reflection of me in the pepper berries.

 More detail and still some reflections of me

I love the colors of this pepper, the fade of red and black!   Tiny spiders making webs between the berries.

I find the foliage of Black Pearl very attractive too, a purple-green-black-bronze burnish.

A cluster of spider webby berries

Immature berries with lone purple flower

The contrast of the green background was nice I thought.  These are like jewels! Who needs rubies or amethysts when there are these plants? 

Hyacinth bean, or lab-lab bean I learned is another name for this plant recently.  Lovely dark purple edible pods eventually.

Not a great pic, but interesting of inside of a rose mallow flower with focus on stamens.  The petal ribs were a cool pleated effect I thought.

A little duller in color, but more equalized focus here again.  Someday I'll get this one right.

Let's pretend to see beauty in destruction ok?  This is the sawfly (that we identified earlier with Dr. Turpin from Purdue's help) damage.  Specifically this is a hibiscus sawfly that has affected the previously shown Rose Mallow hibiscus and this Red River hibiscus.  It seems that I'll need to get pyrethrin to treat the sawfly larval damage as neem hasn't worked.  Luckily, I learned that the Haight Ashbury, and other hibiscus sabdariffa varieties are resistant to this sawfly, so the hibiscus that are delicious are being spared. Yea.

 Closeup of damage.  Lacey, could be pretty almost.  Who needs to crochet when the bugs do it for you?

Taking pics of these new untouched by sawfly damaged hibiscus leaves was wonderful (Doesn't it look like it's indicating to you to come to it?).  Slightly stupid breathless commentary I wrote in haste of this below:

I hold my breath as I take the pictures, one after another, not wanting to breathe  because the inhalation of air would travel from my nose to my lungs, expanding my chest  and raising my arms and moving my hands, ruining the picture.  I begin to see stars and   blackness creeping in at the edges of my vision.  Beauty is literally suffocating me.   The leaves, cupped up, catch the wind, cups of wind, holding distillations of air from  who knows where.  The leaves, full of wind, are able to move the entirety of the tree  in one direction to another. The tree would travel and follow the wind if it could give  up its rooty anchor, but it's content just to sip the wind that flows into its cups.  I  wonder if it would appreciate me digging it up and putting it on a well oiled wagon so  that it might be able to travel with the wind as I can tell it yearns to, but it is too pragmatic and has set down deep roots.  This is home to it, in my yard, and I am glad that it has stayed despite the bugs, despite my poor watering and neglect.

New leaves, what can be more beautiful?

This one reminded me of a chameleon, with little arms!

One final curl.  


Have a great weekend and I hope your garden is doing better than mine!