Yesterday's Blooms
It’s always nice to know the name of the flower that is blooming right now; another challenge is to look for the wildflowers that have faded back to greenery. From a plant cultivator’s standpoint, the action ramps up when the bloom fades. It is then that you have to watch for the seedpods. These can be tiny–dispersed within a day–or large, ostentatious and long-lived, as in many species of milkweed.
I’d say we’re past early spring by now. The first round of squill that appeared all over the neighborhood have faded. I realized that I had never observed these flowers after they lose their blooms. Hard as they are to miss against the grey background of late winter, I forget about them and their distinctive colors as the season goes on. But even though we are two weeks or more past their blooms, the plants are still above ground. I went hunting and found the seedpods of one squill variant, Puschkinia scilloides
