This strange little plant, with a woody stem and three-lobed leaves which are red when new and turn green with age, has been popping up in my backyard. Out of curiosity, I googled it, and found it hiding in a forum post on Dave’s Garden: this is Jatropha gossypiifolia, also known as the bellyache bush,…
Tag: plant
Crinum Lily
This dazzling white and pink lily is probably Crinum zeylanicum, but, since it was found in a human-curated area (Lake Lotus Park, Altamonte Springs, FL), it may be any one of, or a hybrid of, a number of human-cultivated variations of the basic “Crinum lily”, including C. zeylanicum (its closest equivalent, visually) or others. I…
Common Buttonbush
Native to the eastern United States, the common buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) attracts both birds and butterflies with its inch-wide, white spherical blossoms. Buttonbush is a shrub in the Rubiaceae family, often used as an ornamental plant or windbreak. It can get to be pretty large, about 8′ high and 14′ wide. (I am NOT a…
Parasitic Wasp and Gall
This is an interesting setup — this wasp is actually a parasite of a parasite. She’s walking over this tree gall, seeing if she can lay her eggs in any of the parasitic insects living inside the gall! Galls (rounded protrusions of trunk or stem) form on plants when (usually, larval) insects burrow inside. The…
Frogfruit
Ah, the lengths to which I have gone in order to write a post entitled “Frogfruit”. This, er, eccentrically-named plant is also called capeweed, matchweed, and turkey tangle fogfruit, probably not by the same people. It is described as “interesting foliage” by the Florida Native Plant Society. The flower has a spherical purple center (a…
Shepherd’s Needles
This small, white, daisy-like flower with white petals and a yellow center made out of smaller, yellow flowers is Bidens alba, a fast-growing wildflower also known as shepherd’s needles, beggarticks, Spanish needles or butterfly needles. Bidens means two-toothed, and describes the twin projections at the top of the plant’s thin, elongated, black, stick-to-clothing seeds. This…
Oxalis Debilis
I originally took the plant this flower was on to be a clover, but now I am slightly smarter and know that plants in the genus Oxalis just happen to have triplet, round leaves that look like those of clover plants, and are not actually clover (Trifolium sp.) at all. I can’t claim to be…
Atamasco Rain Lily
It’s so rare that I find an actual native species, I get excited about it, even if it’s “just” a flower! This single, lone Atamasco rain-lily (Zephyranthes atamasca) was all by itself in the lawn of a small park on Easter Sunday, 2020, during the coronavirus panic. A little sign that, despite everything, life goes…
Succulent
A closeup of a succulent at Florida Cactus, Inc., in Apopka, FL.