Baltimore Orioles

A couple of Baltimore Orioles flew out of this lovely crabapple. I attempted to take a picture of them as they were hopping around in the bushes but all I got were flashes of orange in leafy green. It is interesting how you can see things much more clearly in real life than in a photo. It isn't just a matter of pixels, "seeing" is more interactive than "looking". You change your focus of attention, you use your depth perception, you move your head to parallax shift thing that are in the way, all in order to construct an image in your mind of the item that has attracted your attention.

I've been noticing these violets along my path for about a decade now. The mowers abandoned their strip around the 1995 planting area over 5 years ago, and now the sumac are starting to overgrow the path yet the violets persist. The trilliums and bloodroot I planted that are a few steps away from these violets inside the forest are still there. They have hardly expanded there presence. I think there were 6 trilliums this year, before the rabbit tax. Time moves at a more sedate pace for plants.

Guerrilla Gardening and Escapees

There is a fine line between guerrilla gardening and escapees. I think this pulmonaria is probably an escapee from the neighbour's garden but I don't know how the lone daffodil below got there. Yesterday I checked out the bloodroot and trilliums I guerrilla gardened. The bloodroot is slowly establishing itself but the trilliums are not having a good year. It seems like someone (looking at you Rabbit) is eating the flower buds. There were only two trilliums in flower yesterday while I recall seeing seven flower buds earlier this spring.

The other day I was checking out a bit of raspberry that I had planted back in 2009 on the north side of the berm. It had never amounted to much as it never overcame the grass in that area, but I was surprised to notice right by the rasperry plant some yellow trout-lily leaves poking through the grass. There isn't any yellow trout-lily on the berm east of Ben-Franklin Park but these guys must have come along for the ride when I took the raspberries from a ditch south of Barrhaven.

I was attacking the patch of dog-strangling vine today, when I happened to notice a Baltimore Oriole feeding in the poplars above me. The patch of dog-strangling vine at the end of Newhaven seems to be surviving my regular attacks on it. I don't believe I have let it set seed since I noticed it a couple of years ago yet the patch is surviving just fine either from the seed bank or from growing back from the roots.

Another rare visitor to the berm I saw last week was a little raccoon. We both froze when we spotted each other and had a bit of a stare-off until he decided that I wasn't going to get out of his way and meandered off into the trees.

In flower

• Dandelion
• Daffodil
• Pulmonaria
• Bloodroot
• Trillium
• Violets
• Garlic Mustard
• Yellow Rocket