just some garden photos from this summer...

We found a nest of robins in the katsura tree, and they grew so fast and hopefully disappeared before getting eaten.


The blueness of morning glories never seize to amaze me:


The strange weed that had been loving the raised bed over the winter turned out to be poison hemlock ('odört' in Swedish), the toxic plant that became Socrates' last drink when he was sentenced to death.  I watched it grew, flower, and then pressed it in the herbarium press before it could set seed! :)
 


Once again the hollyhocks got attacked by the hollyhock rust fungus.  It just isn't the place for hollyhocks, too bad.  In Swedish, hollyhocks are 'stockros', and I have never seen any sick ones in Sweden. I am telling you, gardening in New Jersey is a kind of warfare againsts pests, vermin, fungi, viruses and bacteria.  I don't remember my parents complaining about blister beetles, stink bugs, late blight or anything like that.  OK, we had that potato disease, I remember that... and birds eating cherries, but nothing like this. The good thing is that I can always bring in every fungal pest to my colleagues at work who really appreciate the addition to their teaching collection of fungal pathogens.


This (Glechoma hederacea, ground ivy, 'jordreva') is one of those purple flowers that turn blue when you take a photo of it.  The sensitivity of the digital sensor in the camera is different from our eye, because this flower certainly wasn't blue.  I have seen the same thing happen with slide film, especially Kodachrome.


This was a really cool beetle in the goldenrod flowers, imitating a wasp. I wonder what it is called?