These grow just down the hill from our house, they are a sparse shrub that grows to maybe around 10-15 feet tall. On June 20,2020 they were blooming, so Sandy and I got some pictures of the blossom clusters.
When we went up to Lake Manganese on May 9, 2020 to collect some ore samples[1], we stopped off at Manganese Falls. This is right next to the road, but the only indication of it being there is the sign. Once we stopped, and walked a few feet through the obscuring vegetation, there was a rather abrupt cliff, with a wooden railing, and there were the falls.
Well, it is apple blossom time again. Here are some pictures I took last year (June 8, 2019), of a tree just downhill from our house that was was absolutely covered with blossoms[1]:
This is far from being our only apple tree[2], but last year it was probably the most picturesque one.
Back on April 16, 2020 [1], I was strolling down the hill from our house to see how the snowmelt was proceeding. Some of it was kind of picturesque. Like this spot, where the creek comes out of the woods before it flows down beside the road.
(Most of this posting is about decomposing plants and mud. But, if you go all the way to the end, there is a butterfly picture as a reward)
Just down the hill from our house, there is a spot where the hill flattens out and catches water, making a bog. Cattails grow there. Right at the moment (May 13, 2020), the cattails have not yet re-sprouted, and so there are flat expanses of decomposing plant matter saturated with water.
Yesterday (May 9, 2020), Sandy and I went up to Lake Manganese, which is just outside of Copper Harbor (and about 50 miles north-northeast of our house). We were mainly going up there to find the remains of the former manganese mine[1]. The last stretch was a two-track trail that I didn’t want to drive my car over, so we walked in. Once we got close to our destination, there was a series of cliffs bordering the trail, mostly going through an outcropping of Copper Harbor Conglomerate[2]. Here is one stretch of the cliff, with Sandy at the base of it for scale:
Back on October 1, 2019, I decided to take some pictures of the ragweed that grows alongside our road. This particular enormous specimen was down at the base of the hill, and stood over three feet tall.
We got some significant snowfall at the end of February, but March 1, 2020 turned out to be pretty nice so I went out snowshoeing. Just behind the house, I found a spot where there had been a lot of frantic activity by small animals in the fresh snow.
On June 29, 2019, I happened to look at a patch of tall, unmowed grass at the edge of our yard and noticed that some of the “grass” had rather attractive blue flowers.
While the plants themselves looked pretty grasslike, the flowers are definitely not at all like the normal things you would see in a true grass:
Jade plants (Crassula ovata) make really nice houseplants. At least, they do really well in our house. They are also alarmingly easy to propagate. Just take a leaf or branch and stick it into a pot of soil, water it from time to time, and there you are. We have a bunch of them in the house[1]. Like this one:
