In St. Francisville, IL, you will find the other end of this one lane wooden bridge. You’ll also find a toll keeper who wants a dollar or so to let you off the bridge.
It is said that this bridge is haunted, and it is the first of two sections. It passes over the Wabash River and appropriately named the Wabash Cannonball Bridge even though no such train ever went over it. It can be reached from Vincennes, IN, but you have to look for it.
After living in Florida for decades, I finally took a day and went to the local zoo where I found this furry face. To say that the giraffes are spoiled is an understatement. They stand along the edge of a platform and wait for you to buy leaves to feed them.
I am not sure that they even bother to get their own leaves any more. It was a hot day, but lots of fun. The Brevard Zoo is a great place to visit and they help to conserve the Florida native plants and animals.
I don’t know what strange things were going on in the hibiscus when this one bloomed, but first, it’s on an orange bush, and second, my red bush is way, way, way far away from the plant, and third, I don’t even have a yellow hibiscus!
Wild and beautiful all at once.
This is a long story, but it’s going to have to be a blog post because it’s still ongoing. Here on the end of that leaf is a tiny (like a quarter of an inch) Monarch caterpillar.
It’s on a milkweed plant that I had a lot of trouble keeping, and this little guy was the first caterpillar that I had seen on the plant since it was chopped down and revived. It had become infested with milkweed beetles and aphids.
For the moment, I felt a small yay of triumph when I saw this guy. The story continues …
I could only hope that this was not another one of those hateful, poison-filled caterpillars that crawls all over the porch and my flowers because the face was too cute to be dangerous.
Sure. Sure. The saddleback is a delightfully colorful caterpillar, too. However, this guy seems to be a moth caterpillar.
It is called a Laugher Moth Caterpillar because the adult moth appears to have a man laughing on the wings. I have seen the adults around, but I don’t see anything remotely close to a laughing man on the wings. They are more marbled in muted tones than anything.
Grown from seed, these Black Eyed Susans are more of a midwestern plant, but if you do it just right, you can get some nice flowers down here for at least a little while. I don’t know how long these will last; summer is brutal on all things alive, but maybe they will last into the late fall.
This is my crepe myrtle bush / tree that I was late to trim back this year. So, when it should have been doing some serious leaf pushups, it was wiling away the time letting the lichen grow on it. I was so entranced with this display of colors, textures and dimension that I took several photos of it. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, but being the artist that I am, I am sure I will figure something out.
In addition to the daffodils, I also bought tulips, hyacinths and irises. All of the “up north” flowers that I miss in the springtime. These purple tulips were a wonderful and colorful addition to my back porch, and while they didn’t last, I did try to salvage all of the bulbs in hopes that I could recreate my little garden next spring.
You know we don’t have cold enough winters to plant perennials like daffodils, but I found some bulbs on sale down here that I couldn’t resist. I planted a dozen small daffodil bulbs around my magnolia tree. While they didn’t last long, for a short-time I was reminded of the spring I spent at the Tulipfest in Skagit County, Washington. It’s been a long time, but the flowers were just as colorful.
It was a foggy morning on my way to the office, and I took a shortcut due to traffic. I am glad that I did because the sun was rising on the other side of the bridge, and the fog made it glow.
Julie L. Cleveland 