Color, Light, and Seeds

On my walk yesterday I took 500 pictures. That has to be a record. I deleted about half of them when I got home, but that still leaves a lot of pictures to look through. It’s going to take a long time to decide what to do with them all.

So I’ll start with the easiest. Yesterday was the perfect fall day: sunny, a little chilly, colorful. What I really wanted to do was capture some of its light and color, and I did. Here it is.

I also wanted to catch up with my flowers, see how they had changed since the last time I was there. I hardly recognized some of them. Then there was this thing:

While looking more closely at these photos, I noticed something. The seeds are serrated, and when I focused on the individual seeds, suddenly I realized that their shape was familiar. The seeds have “horns.” It’s been many, many years, but I have seen seeds like these before. Attached to my clothing. These are beggar-ticks!

As to which type of flower these seeds came from, that’s a little hard to say (for me, a non-botanist). But, I’m guessing devil’s beggar-ticks (bidens frondosa). Looking at pictures of devil’s beggar-tick flowers online, it looks similar. I think I’ve seen it in bloom before, but its flowers seemed unremarkable, so I paid it no mind. I might have even thought it was an aster whose petals had fallen off. Devil’s beggar-ticks is not in my field guide, but online sources assure me that it does grow in Rhode Island. The only other likely candidate I found was shepherd’s needle, which has white flowers that I could have mistaken for asters (they’re all in the same family–like I said in a previous post, the aster family is The Thing this time of year). But none of my aster pictures are a match for it, and it just doesn’t look right to me. Devil’s beggar-ticks does, so that’s what I’m calling it, at least for now.

I am disappointed that I don’t have pictures of the flowers from earlier in the year. I’ll have to wait a whole year for another chance. But, in the meantime, here is a wonderful site with amazing close-up pictures of beggar-ticks.