Friday Field Notes--Mum's The Word

I started out early one morning. Just kept walking as the kids went on to school.  I walked 'round back of our building to see if anybody was in the persimmon tree yet--nobody.  The dew was heavy, so I stepped carefully along the concrete culvert so my shoes wouldn't get soaked.

Lycaena phlaeas-- Japanese Copper, summer form

  I looked ahead and saw something bright in the grass...Benishijimi.  I moved quite close, but he didn't fly away.  Closer still I could see he was clinging upside down to a blade of grass...dead?  I touched him gently.  He moved slightly.  Dying.

 Walking through dew will, to be sure, soak your shoes.  But if you lie down on the street and look up, even plants that most people would call weeds are transfigured...


...the faeries' chandelier...

Weed (n.)  an unwanted plant.  A native or nonnative plant that grows and reproduces aggressively.  An invasive species that grows aggressively, choking out or driving to extinction native species.

Humans call certain plant species weeds?  Pot calling the kettle black...

...untouched by sun's early morning rays, the neighbor's camellia is still misted with dew.  Mother-of-pearl petals curve around an ant foraging for food...

Up the road, daisy-like Chrysanthemums growing casually, or accidentally, at the edge of a garden...

Phytoecia rufiventris

...Kikusuikamikiri drinks.  Nectar or dew?

 Walking toward school, I stopped to sit in the sun on the low concrete wall separating the road from the field behind a small factory.  It was cultivated, planted with onions and daikon radishes and bordered with the tallish, leggy  daisy-like mums common to Asia.

Kitateha (Asian Comma) sunning on pink mum

...the bee was too busy to notice a ladybug making its way around the edge of the same golden mum...

I continued on up the road to see what I could see, turning down a narrow road I hadn't gone down before.   A large empty lot stretched ahead on the right--empty to a developer.  But filled with susuki (pampas grass), and edged with a long row of glowing Shokugiku--edible Chrysanthemums...

These mums were tied to the fence so they wouldn't be blown over in the wind, thus deliberately planted, not fortuitously growing there.

Look....

....look closer...

...it's still so early the dew has yet to evaporate
...

...Kitateha has followed me.  The yellow mums are tastier than the pink ones after all...

Mums adorn nearly every garden I pass--some common garden mums, others unusual varieties I've not seen before.






...some bi-colored, edged in white, single petals angled upward...

 ...behind a shed, unseen, ignored, a luminous white specimen with chartreuse centers tumbles down a small slope...

...graces the rain grate..

...and, naturally, I've seen some growing out of the cracks in the steeply sloping concrete embankment of the river...

Some intrepid gardeners attempt to grow the 大菊, Oogiku--the great Chrysanthemum, the flower of the Imperial Seal.  The Chrysanthemum Throne refers to the position of the Japanese emperor, the present emperor and those past.   Though it was first cultivated as a flowering herb in China from the 15th century BC,  modern hybrids are grown world-wide and boast thousands of cultivars like the Oogiku...

The head of the Intermediate Incurve cultivar is so heavy it requires a special wire frame to hold it aloft.



The number of these high maintenance, hard-to-grow mums I see is silent testament to the general skill of Japanese gardeners...

...a car parked in front of such spectacular specimens is somehow...unseemly...

Artificial selection produces fireworks as stunning as any created with gunpowder
...

A variety of Spider Chrysanthemum--the disk florets are completely hidden by the outward explosion of tube-like ray florets...

...white ray florets droop elegantly downward, a lady's fashionable crinoline flounced over a hoop skirt...