Project: One photo a day (but not necessarily every day)

[j44ke]

Puya alpestris - No other flower on earth like these.

Attachment 120199

They look like an image in Photoshop when you over-do a selective color adjustment.

[j44ke]

wife's photo. green hat & boots and I might disappear.

[open roader]

They look like an image in Photoshop when you over-do a selective color adjustment.

I've had these flowering most summers for the past 15 years now. This year they are particularly turquoise, right from the petal margins deep down into the throats. It's been a very long cool wet spring leading into summer and my hunch is that this seasonal factor is the cause as i recall having suck turquoise flowers the year after the millennium drought broke which was also a really wet spring. In drier seasons they are turquoise on the outer rims but show more blue in the throats. They also appear different hues in variable light conditions.

Yes, the profusion of orange pollen is a pollinator's delight but they are not self fertile - require separate plants to successfully cross pollinate. I've occasionally had a pod of seed from a single flowering but the seed are 99.9% non viable. This year I got lucky and had a second flower kick in just at the end of this one so a small window of opportunity for cross pollination which I do with a small cosmetics brush.

Alpestris-03-email.jpg

[j44ke]

new end to old wall - more housing for chipmunks

[bking]

If you want it to last, build it with stone. That's a lot of work, and nicely done.

[mnoble485]

69EF990F-61AC-475B-8F0B-C8E4AD9616F7.jpg

Some mornings we are “above it all”.

Mike

[robin3mj]

[SlowPokePete]

December 31, 2021 by SPP™ SlowPokePete, on Flickr

SPP

[Mabouya]

SPP

I'm surprised that tree lasted that long in that spot, so close to the water - maybe the beavers only recently returned to the area.

[bcm119]

Low elevation (2500ft) snow last week in the foothills outside Yosemite.

[Mabouya]

Low elevation (2500ft) snow last week in the foothills outside Yosemite.

Where's the single skinny track from your bike? ;)

[Dave Thompson]

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[robin3mj]

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Puglia? Looks like Polignaro.

[Dave Thompson]

Puglia? Looks like Polignaro.

Cinque Terre.

[j44ke]

the sun finally came out. after this it got colorful.



I'm guessing that particulate from the Marshall Fire had something to do with this.

[j44ke]

After reading a blog entry on porcupine dens from the local Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program, we realized we had a similar looking tree on our property that we'd never looked at carefully. So we went out and took a closer look - lots of porcupine poop. And we found a quill!

[robin3mj]

[jlyon]

Flat Coated Retriever?

[robin3mj]

We get asked that a lot but we're 95% sure she's mainly Black Lab and Chow- she's got the purple tongue and the noticeable "lion's mane" of the latter.

[j44ke]

here's the porcupine den in ~100 year old white pine