Sunday, August 08, 2010

3047 Strange Plant, Familiar Bug

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Love longs for union.

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The Hunk gave me some plants that were growing in his yard, to plant in my huge pots. He said they'd get large, and they had pretty blossoms.

I've looked in all my plant books, including the Audubon field guide to North American wildflowers, and the Peterson guide to edible wild plants, which details almost all wild plant groups, noting which are edible, inedible, or poisonous. There's nothing even remotely like these plants in any of my books. Not even a family they might belong to.

So. Anyone know what these might be? The flowers open in the afternoon and have a pleasant delicate scent. The leaves absolutely stink, really bad, and leave the smell on your hands if you touch them.

The big plant in the front, and another at the far end toward the left. The blossoms have a long trumpet. The Hunk says they form large seed pods. (Notice also the flamingos hiding off to the top right.)



I also found an insect on my garage door that I haven't seen in years:


It's a Walking Stick! At first I thought he was missing a pair of legs, but his hind pair are straight back along the end of his body. I guess he thinks it makes him look more like a stick. He's about five or six inches long, head to end of tail (not including legs).
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2 comments:

Becs said...

Congratulations. You have seen this flower before - in the work of Georgia O'Keefe. This is a variety of datura, aka jimsonweed, aka locoweed.

Many a wayward teen in Florida used them to make tea. Each one of them ended up in the hospital and two of them died.

Don't eat the datura.

But they do smell pretty.

~~Silk said...

Yeouch! That's exactly it! The wikipedia entry looks exactly like this plant.

It was in my field guides, but I didn't recognize it from the pictures there. Peterson: "All parts of this plant are extremely poisonous."

Yeouch!