🌿M.T.Botany

@mtbotany.bsky.social

313 Followers 92 Following

Botanizer. I'm not mad, just irresponsible. Also not a person made of plants or a killer robot pretending to be human, honest. Wikipedia editor that writes about plants. Normally I post lots about plants, but also expect travel insanity thru September.

A nice bee with a fizzy body and two dark rusty orange stripes and lighter golden hairs elsewhere. She is drinking from one of the round white field bindweed blooms with a pink one to the left.
Many, many round white blooms like wide trumpets amid weedy grass on a hillside.
A robot figure in silhouette before a moon and green tinged landscape. The tile "Service Model" is to either side and the author's name Adrian Tchaikovsky is across the bottom.
St. Isidore Church and Priory in a field of weed stubble. The building is out of proportion with the landscape with large expanses of blank tan brick tipped with a fake copper roof.
Sign in a Mississauga park reading, "CAUTION POISONOUS PLANT Giant Hogweed Please stay on designated pathways. Contact with this plant may require medical attention." The sign is in front of trees and low growing plants. Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike Licence 3.0 Photograph by Sarbjit Bahga Wikimedia Commons
Watercolor of giant parsnip in the Chartham Rectory, Kent, 1905. A thick stand of plants tipped with broad white umbels to the right and two more to the left. Many shady decideous trees in the background. Eleanor Vere Gordon Boyle
The rounded inflorescence of a giant hogweed, rather like a large parsnip with its many white flowers on stems spreading from a central point. The lush green leaves under it are large. Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike Licence 3.0 Photograph by Appaloosa Wikimedia Commons
Clearly the flag of Plantsilvania, not New Zealand since they failed to adopt it, a black upper half is divided from a green lower half by a white stylized fern leaf the large end to the left and the smaller sections of the frond like the Māori design that is like a curling wave, the koru.
Very large painting of a milkweed stem on the side of a building. If asked to guess which species this is I would say swamp milkweed. Dark green leaves attached oppositely to the stems with a round cluster of pink flowers from the axils of the leaves.
A mug with a black and white design of bees and flowers with a few small hexagons on the outside. A stainless steel basket rests on the rim by two flanges with brown-red liquid tea inside.
Masses of chalk pink flowers sticking up above their ferny leaves on stalks bare of leaves that have the flowers hanging off side branches kinda like multiple lanterns on lampposts.
Some prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) seed heads with the long tails like the downy parts of an ostrich feather. Pink shaft and then little white hairs, all of them going upwards together like wisps of smoke. In front of a meadow of yellow flowers.
Eight sheep, one black and the rest gray or partly black, grazing in a meadow with some bushes behind a temporary fence. The high speed ICE train line is in the background. NaturPark Berlin
Several train tracks just barely visible through the grass with birch trees randomly growing between the rails. Berlin, 2023
Birch trees growing up through and around railway tracks. The wooden sleepers are covered in moss as the sun comes through the upper canopy of the white and gray tree trunks. NaturPark Berlin, September 2023
The soft pink of three flowers of prairie smoke against a tall stand of plants in the shade. The sunlight plays over the leaves in the foreground.
The three flowers of Geum trifolium like pink lanterns hanging from atop a stem with little feathery bracts in a green meadow with blurry pines in the background.
George C. Scott in the 1984 production of "A Christmas Carol" as Scrooge. He has some excellent sideburns and a very square face with thinning hair and a pensive look.
A Colorado columbine almost washed out by the sunlight while the leaves at ground level are just barely still in the light while the rest are deeper greens. The petals glow white while the seals and spurs look rather violet rather than blue.
A Colorado columbine flower, the classic blue-purple sepals around five ghost white petals that extend back into long spurs. The center of the flower is filled with many golden stamens.
A picture of a big light brown building trying to look church-y, but feeling a bit like some sort of badly designed office building.
Map with a red pin dropped in Watkins next to I-70 about as far out as the farthest edge of the airport boundary far to the north. Way out, 10 km past the E-470 beltway at the eastern edge of Denver.
A giant, giant church out of proportion with the flat empty landscape of dead, mowed weeds. They were going for an ultra traditional look, but didn't have the money so built a giant structure that reads oddly warehouse like with its wide metal roof and tiny windows in big expanses of light brown brick walls.
A copy of Swordheart by T. Kingfisher sitting on a bookstore shelf, cover out. It has a cover design of a sword with a red grip and two birds sitting on the hilt. A design of plants and towers on a dark background surrounded the sword.
Cover of White Pine: The Natural and Human History of a Foundational American Tree by John Pastor read by Jonathan Yen. Cream colored cover with an illustration of a pine branch with long needles and two long cones.
Cover of The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale by C.M. Waggoner green with a somewhat folk art designing with a little cottage, flowers, a stork with a bundle, a broom, and lots of animals.
Two wet green stems with short narrow leaves
Open meadow sloping down to north arm of the lake beyond. The hills beyond have dark pines and other conifers and somewhat bare aspen stems with light green leaves starting to clothe them.
Map of Steamboat Lake State Park, 1 km scale. The park is irregular in shape and filled with a large lake created by a dam to the east near the southern boundary of the park. There is a half kilometer across island near the center of of the lake separated by a narrow waterway from a long peninsula.
A video of a fairly peaceful lake. Large ripples in a light breeze cause the graminoid (I did not look to see if it were a sedge, grass, or reed) at the edge to wave. A small hill at the far shore of the inlet is covered in conifers. The sky is blue with a few white clouds.
A mug with a black and white design of bees and flowers on the outside. It is filled with a reddish-brown liquid being brewed from a steel basket and sits upon a white saucer.
The sculpture Blue Mustang at the Denver International Airport a.k.a. Blucifer. Photograph at night with the orange sodium light glow of the airport beyond it complimenting the red eye glow of the rearing electric blue horse statue with some disturbing vein details. And yes, it did kill its creator by falling on him in the workshop. Photograph by Michael Sinko Creative Commons by Attribution Share Alike 2.0 19 October 2014
A mug with a black and white design of bees and flowers on the outside. It is filled with a brownish-red liquid being brewed from a steel basket and sits upon a white saucer.
Photograph of many, many inflorescences of the little pink elephants with the gray mass of a willow bush's stems rising at the upper right. The flowers have frilly fern-like leaves amid the coarse grasses.
A pink-violet spike of flowers looking very much like elephant heads and a fuzzy bee with dark orange pollen on her hind legs.
A stand of flower spikes covered in small pink-violet flowers that look surprisingly like elephant heads. Trunk, ears, forehead, there was no other possibility for a common name. A small bumblebee works her way up an inflorescence and then flies off.
A tuft of phlox with flowers ranging from pink to white, the plant is quite compact and short with small leaves.
A single stem with narrow leaves on a page with a scale. The leaves are narrow and grass-like on the stem, shorter ones just 1 cm, but longer ones reaching 2 cm.
OpenStreetMap with a red circle drawn by hand on the green area next to the fitted red line of Willow Creek Trail on an area where the lake wraps around the lower part of the park area. Scale at 50 m, the circle about half that size.
A carpet of phlox plants amid sagebrush. Only a few white blooms dot it but there are many brown remains of finished flowers from earlier in the season.
A video showing many, many five petaled white flowers that cover a ground hugging plant. A few taller plants grow through the ground cover. The shot and up to show the phlox flowers are covering a massive area from the trees to down to where I was standing, about 10 meters away. The almost look like snow under the few sagebrush bushes in the early morning light.
The silver fern design asending from the lower left corner to just past the middle of the flag with the southern cross stars in red to the right.
Screenshot of xTools showing Global edit counts (approximate) ► en.wikipedia.org 15,764 commons.wikimedia.org 3,412 www.wikidata.org 800 sv.wikipedia.org 7 de.wikipedia.org 6 en.wikivoyage.org 4 en.wiktionary.org 2 nl.wikipedia.org 2 es.wikipedia.org 1 ms.wikipedia.org 1 Other projects 2 All projects 20,001
A medium sized black bee with shiny wings working a northern wyethia flower that looks like a small sunflower, but this bloom has one of the petal ray flower damaged and bent over at the upper left giving it an especially rustic look.
Bumblebee on a northern wyethia flower. She has two fuzzy orange stripes and a black end with a lighter yellow fuzzy stripe towards her wings. She is working the center of the flower which looks like a small sunflower or a very large yellow daisy with big green leaves.
The white flowers of American bistort in a field of green northern wyethia leaves.
Line drawing of Wyethia amplexicaulis showing the root going down almost 2 meters/6 feet, with a smaller 60 cm plant atop it.
A field of knee high flowers with yellow blooms like sunflowers and long green leaves, shaped rather like a mule's ear. The northern wyethia or black sunflower (Wyethia amplexicaulis) wave in the breeze. Beyond the meadow mixed pines and aspen trees form a backdrop under a somewhat cloudy sky, though the sun is shining down.
Glass with gold rim held in left hand filled with cloudy wheat beverage with white foam in front of a green meadow above a blue lake with a tree covered hill on the far side. Sunny day.
A Colorado Scenic Byway sign with a Columbine on it and a blue sign under that point left (east) to "Colo River Headwaters"
We start focused on some penstemons (Penstemon strictus? I need to key them out still) and then rise up to show a nice area with many more plants in good bloom. Then we approach the area of the scarlet skyrockets and it is wonderful. I look around in awe at all the tall stalks adorned with pink trumpet shaped flowers.
A slightly pink seed head that I will explain later. There are yellow flowers in the background that will also be talked about excessively because I am a Plant Person™. But I swear I am not a corpse being driven about by a parasitic blueberry bush.
Looking uphill through a large patch of dense scarlet skyrocket, though in this case the trumpet shaped flowers on tall stems are quite pink.
A patch of pink flowers near a blue lake, the flowers take up a shallow bowl sloping down to the lake, but the shore is dominated by the blue-green of sagebrush.
The wind blowing through many, many, many (so many, this is really unusual) scarlet skyrocket blooms (Ipomopsis aggregata). In the distance a lodgepole pine stands under a blue sky.
Picture of the northern arm of Steamboat Lake, looking towards Hans Peak, the quite pointy mountain without trees on the top. The yellow sunflower looking plants are northern wyethia/mule ears (Wyethia amplexicaulis). There are also mountain geraniums (pink) and sulfur flowers (light yellow). More about them another time.
A triangular mountain with a bare summit rising above a mixed forest of dark pines and spruces with some Aspen groves. In front of it a lake extends from the camera to meadows at the foot of the mountain and its nearby hills.
Looking at flowers with multiple stems that resemble orange-red flames amid short grass. More orange with larger bracts toward the top and smaller leaves towards the base.
Me nattering on about two plants. First the three purple petals of a pine spiderwort which is like thick grass stems strung together. Next the woolly plantain with narrow nasal leaves and an inflorescence somewhat like grass with tiny flowers on a tall, narrow cylinder. Also fuzzy.