Friday Flowers

            Almost  every Friday of the year, I go out looking for flowers in the Hamilton area. On almost every other day of the year, I just look for flowers wherever I happen to be. The Friday flower walk in Hamilton is due to my having lived in Hamilton for over 30 years and having kept records of blooms that I found there for many of those years. Since I retired, I have been volunteering at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton on Fridays so I continue on those days to update my Hamilton wild flower list. In the last few years, I have added a few of the cultivated flowers that grow outdoors at the RBG. Because I have spent so many hours looking for flowers I have become better adapted at finding obscure ones. It also helps that I have been leading wild flower walks since the fall of 1981 and many eyes see a lot more flowers.

            With all that as a lead up, I would like to report that on November 30 of 2018 I found 8 wild flowers in bloom and 2 cultivated flowers. This in spite of a lot of cloudy days in November this year, a couple of snowfalls, and several days of subfreezing temperatures during the month. Just for the record, as of this year, I have found 224 wild flowers in bloom in November and have recorded 19 cultivated flowers. I know there have been more cultivated flowers in bloom but I have not recorded them for various reasons.

            The first flower photo of the day represents a very small wild flower that is supposed to bloom in early spring. A few years ago I found it blooming in December but this is the first time I have found it in November.

            I put in this first photo just to indicate how small the flower is as it shows the view of the flower from my standing position at the edge of a weedy bit of flower garden at the RBG. I suspect that you, and 99% of the visitors of the garden, would have missed it. I saw it because it is in a location where I had seen the plant in previous years and I also was looking for another very small weed flower that often grows in the same area.

            This second photo shows the flower a bit more clearly and I am sure the arrow that I added will help the finding of the flower.

            The third photo is from my Olympus Tough camera in it's "super close up focus stacking" mode. I was pleased with the result of this little point-and-shoot camera used without the recommended tripod. 

            The flower was native to Great Britain and north-central Europe but arrived in North America with the early colonizers. The name in my wild flower book is Whitlow Grass. The French is Drave printanière; Latin, Draba verna.

           Using the same camera and the same shooting mode I photographed  a flower on the native Witch Hazel / Hamamélis de Virginie / Hamamelis virginiana.

             The last photo is another of the Tall Goldenrod \ Verge d`or haute \ Solidago altissima.

            The other flowers seen yesterday were as follows:

Natives : 

Heath Aster \ Aster éricoïde \ Symphyotrichum ericoides

New England Aster \ Aster de Nouvelle-Angleterre \            Symphyotrichum novae-angliae

Panicled Aster \ Aster lancéolé \ Symphyotrichum lanceolatum

Aliens from Europe:

Hairy Bittercress \ Cardamine hérissée \ Cardamine hirsuta 

Common Groundsel \ Séneçon vulgaire \ Senecio vulgaris

Cultivated:

'Chaplin's Red' Witch Hazel \ Hamamélis virginiana 'De Champlin Red' \ Hamamelis virginiana ‘Champlin’s Red’

'Winter Dawn' Witch Hazel \ Noisetier de sorcière 'Winter Dawn' \ Hamamelis x intermedia 'Winter Dawn'