plant – Page 19 – Owlnature

Mountain cornflowers, petunia and their friends

Yesterday’s flower pics.

Centaurea montana or mountain cornflower or perennial cornflower or mountain bluet. These, too, are flowers that we have on many different spots in our garden, thank you, the previous owners of this house! I like these. 🙂

The tiny yellow flowers on the background are meadow buttercups, very wild in our garden… 🙂

More petunia pics. Now the lovely colour combination can be seen a bit better…

In the same pot with the petunia is another flower, too. It was there when we got this, and I don’t know what this flower is, haven’t found the answer. I call it the white crown flower…

…or the white flower crown…

EDIT: The answer came to me in a garden store, I saw these flowers there with a name tag. 🙂 This is verbena, rautayrtti in Finnish.

Red campion or red catchfly. A bit wild in our garden as well. And a bit everywhere, for example around the rapids.

On Friday by the lake Pyhäjärvi. It was raining a bit as I took this pic.

-Leena

Coffee, starflowers, forget-me-nots

Coffee along with some charming tiny flowers today…

…and another one of our many Ibiza lizards… 😀 This one left with us from the Hippy Market Punta Arabí in May 2014.

Stars in the woods beside our garden. Arctic starflower or chickweed wintergreen. There really was a starry ground in the woods, now many of the flowers have already started to fade away… There are also lingonberry flowers in the pic above.

Such a beautiful forest flower the starflower…

And another one of my favourites, wood forget-me-not. We have a bed of forget-me-nots at the back of our garden. Precious. 🙂 I hope they still bloom for some time…

-Leena

By the home rapids, a couple of peony buds & a petunia flower

I took some pics again by our home rapids, the Kauttuankoski rapids, yesterday evening when we visited it. Here is my previous blog post about the rapids.

The Kauttuankoski rapids and so many faces… In the previous blog post I was mostly on the other side of the rapids, in this post I’m on the opposite side, and a bit further, too.

Some evening light already in these pics, but the nights are so light now, too, this time of the year in Finland – in southern Finland as well, but it’s a whole different story in northern Finland these days – it’s so much lighter there at night, and in the northernmost point of the country, the sun doesn’t set at all… Magicall… 😉

The ruins of an old mill on the right.

Water flows under the ruins, too

There are some very old trees. I tried to take pics of the massive trunks, but these pics can’t exactly tell how big these lovely trees really are. And they are mossy from the other side. Like in a fairytale. 🙂

From the bridge.

The wind is still blowing like crazy, but I managed to take a pic of our petunia. I love this colour combination! (More pics of this later, hopefully.)

I tried to take pics of our mountain cornflowers, too, for this blog post, but the wind was too much. 😀

And a couple of peony buds. On our front yard in the pic above and on the back yard in the pic below.

-Leena

Early summer in full swing

So now the first blog post here in Owlnature when it’s already officially summer. 🙂 The summer has advanced very quickly in nature and in garden this year. I feel that it’s all been much quicker than a year ago… I mean, the apple flowers for example – it was like a *imagine some sound of magic here* and they were all gone, just as quickly as they came…

First a pic from yesterday… I was sitting on a swing and almost didn’t take a pic at all, but some… magic made me grab my camera, and I’m glad I did! – It was a nice moment to sit on a tire swing by our lake Pyhäjärvi here in Satakunta region.

A moment by the lake Köyliönjärvi over a week ago.

The rest of the pics of this post are from last week.

Globeflowers in our garden. The previous owners of this house have planted these in different spots in the garden. Thanks! One of my favourite perennials.

About the weather lately… last week was hot, but then it became cold – well, you have to have the decent balance of weather here in Finland. 🙂 Yesterday was very nice and today, too, the sun is shining warmly, but the wind is blowing like crazy.

The rest of the pics of this post are pics of lilacs. The first two pics are taken of the lilac bush by the big Norway maple beside our driveway. The lilac flowers, too, are something that seem to like come and go a bit too quickly this summer… but luckily there’s still some time to enjoy the lovely scent of the flowers.

The man who build this house has planted lilacs in three different spots in the garden, and these are only the common lilacs – there are also two bushes of different types of lilacs in our garden, I think they are called park lilacs or Hungarian lilacs and it’s so nice that they bloom a bit later, after the common lilac flowers are already gone…

I somehow always find it a bit difficult to take pics of the lilac flowers, I’m never totally satisfied with my lilac pics. But I encourage and advise everyone, including myself, to take it easy and not to stress about something like the pics, and taking pics, too much. I promote enjoyment and living in the moment, without camera, too! Even when you have a website or a blog! 😀 The right people will enjoy and laugh with you in this life anyway…

Another lilac bush beside the apple trees in the garden.

OK, and now I don’t know what to say anymore… 🙂

Our third lilac bush is beside the woods and a bit under the bush somehow is one of our composts, too. And there are also white lilac flowers, so there are actually two bushes in one. Our other lilac bushes have only violet flowers.

So, still some time to enjoy…

-Leena

Plum tree in bloom

Our plum tree is in bloom. We planted this tree last spring. Last summer it had two flowers, but no fruits. I was humbly thinking that we wouldn’t have any plum flowers this year – this tree probably doesn’t like it here, in our garden, and won’t thrive. 🙂

On Saturday I finally tried to count the flowers and buds the tree has… there was over a hundred opened flowers and several dozen flower buds. This is a self-pollinating tree. It would be great to have two plum fruits this year! 🙂

The wind was blowing nicely…. But it’s been a very warm day.

A fairly tiny tree.

When I first saw all the flower buds I could hardly believe what I was seeing. 🙂 So, let’s wait and see what happens when the flowers disappear…

More about the plum tree and taking care of it here and here.

-Leena

Rainy day pics

But first one pic from yesterday:

I was playing a surgeon, a seed potato surgeon – you have to be very cautious when you’re taking the seed potatoes out of the net bag packing, because the shoots get so easily detached from the potatoes and then they will not give you any food… or the food will be very slow… 🙂

So yesterday we made our potato field. It was actually hard work… as it always is with garden… hard, but so nice and therapeutic. 🙂 I took this pic today, as well as the rest of the pics in this blog post.

A rainy day, fresh air and expecting it to be even greener after some rain. It hasn’t rained for days, weeks, at least for a bit more than two weeks it has been dry. Now we don’t have to use the tap water to water everything growing in the garden. Have to be grateful. 🙂

OK, I don’t know how to keep up with the rhubarb…

These, some fern, we have many, the previous owners of this house have planted them. I’m not sure, but the current man of this house may have planted some, too.

Just some of our fern…

This geometric flower plantation is a man made. 😉

-Leena

Some miscellaneous in owlgarden & identification ( – answer found)

These first two coffee pics are from yesterday. Some food included in the first pic. 😉

They say it will rain over the weekend. Today we still have some planting to do, and lawn mowing, too.

Our Norway Maple in flower beside the driveway. I took this pic in our front yard today.

Have some cactus, or… Bali? One of my favourite pastilles. Tasty.

Now I need some heeelp! What is this flower called? 🙂 I have a hunch that it’s actually quite common in Finland… The leaves of this plant look a bit poisonous… it’s the spots. I tried to google this flower, but couldn’t find it. This flower stands in the middle of our garden.

EDIT: I found the answer last night, on 14th May. It’s Pulmonaria officinalis, rohtoimikkä in Finnish. And common names in English: common lungwort, lungwort or Our Lady’s milk drops. It’s not poisonous, but an old herb used for medical purposes. It’s a perennial plant and cultivated, not natural, in Finland. They say that the white spots look like unhealthy lungs and the scientific name Pulmonaria officinalis comes from that. Well, I couldn’t see that in particular, but they do look dangerous to me. 🙂 They say this actually is a herbal medicine for lungs.

I already earlier had browsed through a couple of plant and flower books we have, but couldn’t find this flower in them. Last night I finally started to browse through a book that I bought from a flea market some weeks ago. And I found this plant very fast from the book. The book’s original (=English) title is The Complete Book of Herbs and it’s from the year 1988. This book is fairly big and it cost me 50 Euro cents. Sometimes it’s just the books, not the Internet, and the older the book, the better! 🙂

On the vappu weekend we planted sunflower seedlings outside. They were raised from the seed inside the house. We planted these on four different spots in our garden. Hopefully we’ll have at least one fully grown sunflower. That would be great. Last year the seeds were planted straight into soil, and nothing grew. This time we did it properly and in the right way. So, now just hoping… This one in the pic for example has already grown stronger. 🙂

-Leena