plants

My girlfriend planted sunflowers in that pot but something else started growing. We can't identify it. Can you help?

Taken at the Desert Botanical Gardens parking lot in April. The heat that day was stifling yet so was the beauty of my surroundings!

Fun factoid: These trees have chlorophyll rich bark that perform photosynthesis.

With a sweat bee on it for good measure

This plant works hard to clean the water I keep out for wildlife. This one grabbed up so much nitrogen/phosphorus that it got pot bound in one year. I split it in half so each half has twice as much room to grow this year.

tldr: urban woodland edges around Boston are accumulating carbon faster than expected because the soil microbiome is less functional than in more rural systems. How long that will work as a C sink is unknown.

The large flowered collomia (Collomia grandiflora) is just starting to bloom around me. They are annual and have cool blue pollen (typically pollen is yellow). You can see the pollen on the anthers at the center of each flower.

I am going to keep tossing these out into the ether unless I hear differently from the group. I have been doing flowers just because their showy, but if anyone has requests let me know (eg trees, sedges, garden plants). Also, I have been avoiding having pollinators in the photos on the assumption that any animal makes most people ignore plant. Any thoughts on that?

This one is meadow-foam (Limnanthes douglasii). It's annual that is native to prairies of the west coast of North America. Smells great, looks cool, and bugs like it. Comercially, similar plants are grown for the oil from their seeds. The seeds off this one will just fall where they want to sprout up in spring of '22.

For me it is my phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia) blooming. I throw some seed down wherever I don't have other plans because the bugs love the flowers? What have you got going?