spectacles, feathers and cat piss

It's been one of those glorious autumn days here, warm but not hot, and with cool nights. On my daily walk through the neighborhood I noticed again this plant blooming in isolation at the roadside. It is quite a showy thing, with snowy white flowers. In the corner of my eye, it looked like an Iberis (candytuft). But candytuft would never survive on our (lack of) rainfall here. I think that it is Dimorphocarpa wislizeni (Spectacle pod). Don't you love the name? Dimorphocarpa. Two form'ed seed pods? Well they do have two parts to the silicle* which indeed looks like a pair of glasses or specs. The spectacle for me, however, was the flowers.



I finally took a shot at my neighbor's liatris, which I assume is the native Liatris punctata (spotted gayfeather). In the late afternoon, the flowers glow with vibrant color. Apparently the bees think so, too, and are attracted in numbers at any time of the day. Happily growing on precipitation alone, the leaves are attractive but not very remarkable tufts of green, growing from the underground rootstock in the spring, so slowly and unnoticeably as to be sneaky. Then in the fall, suddenly overnight, the flowers scream for attention. It's the botanical equivalent of someone sneaking up behind you and suddenly shouting.



I was in my garden today, getting annoyed (or pissed if truth be told) at the cat piss smell in my back yard. Whose #!^*&! cat has been peeing in my yard? =^..^= I remembered there was a cat in my front yard when I came home from a run the other night. He thought that he could hide in the dark shadows under the tree since it was well after sundown, but it was still bright enough that I could see him. I shook my finger at him and told him that he could chill in my garden as long as he didn't harm the plants. But in my back yard today, I didn't see any telltale mounds, and the gravel is not a particularly attractive place for cats to use as a litterbox. Maybe an hour passed with my annoyance increasing. Then it dawned on me to look over the fence. Yep, the chamisa has started to bloom.



* botany lesson (simply because it is such a cool word)
Silicle: a dry, dehiscent, 2-carpeled fruit that dehisces along two sutures, as a persistent partition (replum), and is as broad or broader than it is long, e.g. Brassicaceae. How cool is that?