Foliage Follow-Up to Bloom Day

Pam at Digging has a new meme going that celebrates foliage and other non-blooming natural things around the yard, the day after Carol's Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. While photographing my yard for blooms (my Bloom Day post is here), I had great fun in photographing the many interesting textures and colors in the garden. I think this might be the last hurrah for my 'Bloodgood' Japanese Maple above, but a nice hurrah it is.



I wish I had thought to put something at the base of this pine tree so you could tell how massive it is. When I hug this tree (yes, I do that occasionally), I can't get my arms all the way around. I wish I knew the variety of pine it is (might be Short Leaf pine since it has very short needles).



This time of year is when the ‘Silver Shower’, Ophiopogon jaburan, a type of mondo grass, starts putting on new growth. Seems a strange time for it but that's what it does. I have several of these in mostly shade.



The foxtail ferns (Asparagus meyeri I think) are in large pots nestled against the house. I'm too scared to leave them out exposed where I normally have them most of the year. I probably don't have to worry though. They're very hardy.



The texture on my ‘Felt Plant’, Kalanchoe beharensis, is like velvet. Although this photo is towards the top of the plant, the older leaves show more bumps on their undersides.



I like the way my red oak is still determined to hang on to some of its chlorophyll.



Moving to a more ancient form of vascular plant, we have Horsetail Rush, Equisetum hyemale. (It's ancient because it reproduces by spores, not seeds.) This is in a pot in my little water fountain. So far I haven't had to protect it from freezing yet.



I really don't mean for this to be a botany lesson but now I seem to have moved to non-vascular plants like this moss (the black stuff is mold, green stuff is moss). This appears during the rainier seasons on our chimney.



And now I've moved to lichens, which according to Wikipedia is "a symbiotic association of a fungus (the mycobiont) with a photosynthetic partner (the photobiont or phycobiont), usually either a green alga (commonly Trebouxia) or cyanobacterium (commonly Nostoc)". Plus a little moss thrown in on the rock for good measure.



More lichens and rock. The only native rock around here is something called "iron ore", so these rocks come from Arkansas. Makes me feel a bit guilty that they're not native but iron ore is usually small, rusty, and hard to work with.



I guess I'll end my impromptu romp through the plant kingdom with a fungus, some type of big mushroom.

Be sure to check out the links to other Foliage Follow-up posts at Pam's (and my Bloom Day post if you haven't seen it yet)!

This post was written by Jean McWeeney for my blog Dig, Grow, Compost, Blog. Copyright 2009. Please contact me for permission to copy, reproduce, scrape, etc.