buttonbush

Jul. 23rd, 2017 at 9:31 AM

The Ashley reservoir is now one of my go-to places to take people when they visit. I took my old college friend and her husband there, and learned that the water-loving plant that I had thought looked very mangrove-y is buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), which grows up and down the Atlantic coast and as far inland as the Mississippi, and is indeed a species in the mangrove biome!

Buttonbush

Yesterday I took

osprey_archer there (and we read aloud to each other--so much fun), and lo and behold, the buttonbush was in bloom! I didn't have a camera, so she obliged me with a photo:

Buttonbush in flower, by

osprey_archer

The flowers look like how pollen looks under a scanning electron microscope:

Buttonbush flowers....

Pollen, much magnified:

(source)

Or, um... like an influenza virus...

(source)

It smells nice, though, and bees and butterflies love it. AS DO I.

This entry was originally posted at http://asakiyume.dreamwidth.org/857575.html. Comments are welcome at either location.

Comments

( 16 comments — Leave a comment )

yamamanama

Jul. 23rd, 2017 11:09 am (UTC)

I've never seen a buttonbush but they look really cool.

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asakiyume

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:09 pm (UTC)

They are! And they like wet feet--they can grow in water.

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sartorias

Jul. 23rd, 2017 12:54 pm (UTC)

Those blue flowers are especially lovely!

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asakiyume

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:11 pm (UTC)

I think you may be misinterpreting a photo, or maybe this comment was meant for someone else's page? There are no blue flowers here, only white ones--though the final picture (of the influenza virus) has tiny blue rods on it.

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sartorias

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:18 pm (UTC)

Down at the bottom, a really gorgeous shade of blue. My eyes zoomed straight to it.

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asakiyume

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:25 pm (UTC)

If you mean the last picture, that's the influenza virus! So beautiful, and yet the cause of so much misery!

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sartorias

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:29 pm (UTC)

No, it's the top picture. Way at the bottom of it, there are blue blossoms. I thought those were the ones you meant at first. (There's a tiny bit of it at the extreme low right, too.) An exquisite shade of blue.

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asakiyume

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:33 pm (UTC)

Ah--in that case, I think what you're seeing is the reflection of the sky in the water. It's hard, because different monitors display colors differently, so you and I are looking at slightly different versions of the same picture, but there's water and sunlight sparkles in the bottom half of that picture, and I think that must be it. If you click on the photo, and then click again, you'll see the whole thing much larger: it's just bushes growing in water, with deep shade and bright sunlight dappling everywhere.

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sartorias

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:37 pm (UTC)

Oh, you're right! I embiggened it, and yes, it's the sky. But what a beautiful shade!

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yamamanama

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:47 pm (UTC)

What a perfectly cromulent word.

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sartorias

Jul. 23rd, 2017 01:49 pm (UTC)

And I love cromulent. It tastes like scones with honey butter.