The Rain Garden at Charleston Falls, July 13, 2019

I sat down to write this and realized I hadn't taken notes or pictures of everything to tell this story.  When I saw the prairie plants flowering in the Rain Garden near the entrance to the trails at Charleston Falls, all I thought about were the blooms.

I know Rain Gardens, whether planted in a a natural depression or in a dug out depression, are meant to drain water and are usually wet only seasonally or after heavy rains.  The flowers that grow on tall grass prairies are adapted to land which is wet in spring and dry in the summer so prairie plants and Rain Gardens complement one another.

A section of the Rain Garden at Charleston Falls.  The rock covered dip to the left of the photo slopes down from the paved gathering place for groups.

And in the depression, I saw....

the round flower heads of Rattlesnake Master and Queen of the Prairie.  The yellow Black-eyed Susans, (Rudbeckia hirta) are on the higher ground of the rest of the planted prairie.

I usually have to go to Garbry Big Woods Preserve to see the Rattlesnake Master and to Aullwood Audubon Center to see the Queen of the Prairie.   Seeing the two plants made my walk one to remember and I hadn't taken a step into the peaceful woods.

Closeup of the Rattlesnake Master, (Eryngium) ...

Each bud will open exposing a tiny flower.

A closer look at the Queen of the Prairie (Filipendula rubra) ...

Our First Noticeable Frost, Oct, 18, 2018

I looked out the dining room window...a skim of ice on the birdbath.

I looked out the garage door...orange-red leaves on the neighbor's treetop.

In the neighbor's yard...white frosted tips on the evergreens, white frosted grass on the ground.

I walked out to the prairie patch...Frost on the seedheads of the bergamot.

Fall is here.

Tipp City Mum Festival, September 30, 2018

Tom was on a mission.  When he is in a crowd, foremost in his mind is navigating through it.  I followed along behind and looked at booths and signs.  Over in the distance on the left side of the photo is the Tipp City High School Football Stadium.  A group of citizens are in the process of raising money to renovate it.  This year they collected enough to redo the field. There is an overall plan and they choose sections of it to work on as the money is collected.

I think  renovating the stands is next on their list.  I hope so.

This was the sixtieth year for the festival.  When it started, the Springhill Nursery had fields of mums planted in fields along the highway so chrysanthemums were the obvious choice for the festival's emphasis.  Since then Springhill has been sold several times and no longer has the fields of mums but the name remains and so do mums at the festival.

Years ago when we were active  in Cub Scouts with our boys, we were part of the Saturday morning  parade.

Later on, I had a booth at the park where I drew charcoal sketches of visitors for ten dollars each.

There must have been  more Tipp area artists and artisans at the park but Tom kept zipping along.  I only saw Paper Alice.  She had a booth at the park when I did and she has continued to have a booth.

She makes beautiful paper from the ads she receives in the mail.  She includes bits of leaves and flower petals and tiny stones and spices from her kitchen to add interest.  She sells her paper, creates art on her paper and teaches others how to make paper.  In this picture, you can see everything she uses to go from start to finish.

And here is a closer look at her paper.

If you are curious about her work  you can get more information at
www.paperalice.com

 The last time we came to the festival in the park, food truck events were a fairly new type of event in our area.  There were only a few food trucks at the park.  This year there were many, many food trucks.

 I photographed this truck because man with the red and black striped cap is one of the old-time baseball players.  Tipp City has an old-time baseball team.  There are others in the area.  They play baseball according to the old-time rules.  There was a baseball tournament in progress.  It was between games for this player.

Local groups as well as food truck owners were selling food.  I remember the Fire Department selling waffles back in the days when we were part of the Cub Scout group.

The park was crowded with booths.  In them people were selling...

bamboo socks...

alpaca sweaters....

Halloween decorations...

Fairy Princess crowns...

and hundreds of other wares.

Tom knew where he wanted to stop...The Miami County Park District tent.

They had a step by step craft set up so people could make a paper flower.

As we were leaving, I looked down the path and there they were...the pick-up basketball players.  I see players on these courts almost every time I drive by the park.  

A pleasant visit to the park on a pleasant day.  The sun was shining. The temperature was in the low 80s and there was a gentle breeze. 

Painting at the Little Mader Farm

Marsha arranged for our painting group to paint at the Little Mader Farm for the second time.  The weather was perfect, sunny, cool enough to need a light jacket but warm enough after a lunch snack to take the jacket off.  Jerri made  a delicious blueberry coffee cake for us.  There were five of us painting, half of the original plein air group from five or six years ago.  It was good to see everyone.

I painted and sketched, sketched and painted using the Micron pen and watercolor technique I have been playing with the last couple months.  When I looked at the painting after I came home, I realized I had painted a chair with only three legs.  I painted one in.  The rest of the painting is as it was when I laid down my brush for the final time at the farm.

Saturday of Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 2017

Henry came again to visit because Sonja was in the process of moving from one house to another.  I know Henry had more attention from us than Sonja had time to give him.

Steve came to visit, too.  

One Saturday, Steve and I went to the Fort Rowdy Gathering in Covington.  This was the twenty-fifth year for the event.  Years ago I took Steve's brother to the gathering.  The gathering is a little larger now but still uncrowded and easy-going.

The gathering is on two open grassy areas surrounded by trees, one area on either end of a bridge across the Stillwater River.  The bridge is rebuilt every year for the weekend and then taken down.

Close to the shore, Steve spotted a school of several hundred tiny fish swimming fast and away from us.

Life in the encampment is old style camping.  There is a native American encampment as well.

Arts and crafts are demonstrated and sold on both sides of the bridge but they are somewhat different.  On the near side there are painted gourds and fine needlework and other crafts that a person finds at a typical craft show.  On the far side are the craftmen and women who make the kind of crafts Daniel Boone would have found useful.  One craftsman we talked to was making a water jug from leather.  The crafts are laid out on blankets or tables or hung on racks.

There was music on the tents on both ends of the bridge as well.  The old, old songs the settlers brought from Europe were sung on the far end encampment.  The listeners sat on straw bales.

As Steve and I headed back to the bridge because we were hungry and the food booths were on the other side, we saw a boy fishing.  He caught a little blue gill and threw it back in to grow larger.

View from halfway across the bridge.

 On the near end, the music was more modern country music.  There were amps set up as well as bleachers for the listeners to sit on.

This festival is a money making event for local non-profit organizations.  Steve and I bought lunch from the boy scouts...brats and kraut and mashed potatoes.  For dessert we had homemade apple dumplings and ice cream from the booth next door.

A Bouquet of Prairie Flowers, August, 2017

Earlier this month, Marsha came to paint with me.  I was pleased to see her.  I haven't been painting much for several years.  I needed a jumpstart.  Marsha, bless her, seems to have done that.

The flowers in the bouquet are from our yard...the smaller yellow ones with the graceful thin stems are Tall Coreopsis, the bigger yellow ones are Oxeye, and the orange are Butterflyweed.  The pitcher is one we bought in either Williamsburg or Jamestown, Virginia.  I remember Williamsburg.  Tom remembers Jamestown.  I received the tatted star doily in a Christmas gift exchange when I was co-oping at Landers Corporation in Toledo my senior year in high school.

This is how the painting looked after the painting session with Marsha.  I started with a rough sketch using a Micron pen, then laid in watercolors.  I was hoping to keep the painting as a sketch, an impression, not a photographic image.

I always need to make frequent stops to "think".  This was the result of my thinking.

Another day to "think".  I decided to lighten the fabric on the right side, also to redarken the leaves at the pitcher edge.  I had wiped out a lot of the color.  Then I went bolder with the watercolor.  The very last strokes I made were a few with a white gel pen to bring back some reflections on the pitcher.

The Brukner Nature Center Butterfly Transect, August 13, 2017

Joy and frustration. The day was hot and sunny. We saw ten species of butterflies although we didn't see many of any of them.  My biggest frustration was that this was the best picture of a butterfly that I took...A Silver-spotted Skipper.  The warmer the weather the less likely it is for a butterfly to sit quietly for a portrait.

First the joy...

Molly, who is good at identifying moths and caterpillars of both moths and butterflies walked with us today.  Because of her I saw this beautiful caterpillar.  She told me it was the caterpillar of an Eight-spotted Forester, a moth.

When Tom and I were looking at prairie flower sites last month, I took this photo of the adult Eight-spotted Forester.  It is a showy moth which flies during the day.  It has showy tufts on its forelegs.

And now the frustrations...

This is a Hackberry perched on the wall of the Interpretive Center.

A little better photo of an Eastern Tailed Swallowtail.

But then here is one of a Monarch.  We saw two.

A Summer Azure looking worn.

I drove into our drive hoping that Jim got some better photos.  On the garden phlox beside the drive was this butterfly.  I took a few photos.  Butterflies move faster when the temperatures are in the eighties (Fahrenheit) so I took a lot of photos to get these two that enabled me to identify it as a Spicebush female.  I was happy to see one more species of butterfly.

Wildflowers at Brukner on March 1, 2017...Spring is here.

Not only is this plant blooming.  Dozens of them are blooming.  The Hepatica are not yet carpeting the woodland floor but they are off to a good start.

The day was windy, gusts up to forty miles per hour earlier in the day. I could hear dead branches falling from the trees. I decided to cut my hike short.

I had really hoped to find a Snow Trillium.

The Hepatica are blooming where I usually find the Snow Trillium. But this winter and early spring have been unusually warm.  I wonder...Do Snow Trillium respond to the length of the days and Hepatica to the warmth of the weather?  

Anyway, I was pleased to see the Hepatica. As I headed back up toward the parking lot, I kept looking.  There is a hillside along the return trail where more and more Snow Trillium have been showing up in recent years and there I found a bud.  I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been searching.

A little further up the trail, I found the Purple Cress I had found on February 24, the last day I had hiked this trail.  Its buds were still tightly closed.

I just happened to glance on the other side of the trail.  In a spot of sunlight, I found this.

Purple Cress is blooming.  Hooray!