We still have a few batches of photos from readers, but I’m rationing them out. PLEASE send your good wildlife photos. The death of this section would be a blow to me.
Today’s photos come from Rik Gern of Austin, Texas, showing various bits of plants. The captions are Rik’s, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here is a collection of nuts and seed pods found while taking walks around the neighborhood. I have a habit of picking them up, marveling at them, sticking them in my pocket, and then making little displays or shelf decorations with them when I get home. That was starting to get out of hand, so I decided it was time take some pictures of them before cleaning house and returning them to nature.
This exotic item is a Magnolia seed pod (Magnolia grandiflora). It looks very large in these close-up photos, but in reality the body is a little over two inches long and about an inch and a half wide. The stem is one inch long.
This picture makes it look like some sort of strange sleeping mammal:
Here is a cluster that includes the seed pod from a Red Yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora), along with acorns from Post Oak (Quercus stellata) and Burr Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) trees:
Viewed up close, the Red Yucca seed pod almost looks like pale green skin with veins under the surface.
The Pecans (Carya illinoinensis) are the most at home in this collection since the background consists of Pecan bark and leaves. Pecans are very common around here and are fun to harvest in the fall.
This strange looking object is called a gum drop and is a seed pod for the American Sweetgum tree (Liquidambar styraciflua). The seeds are long gone and all that remains is the woody pod. People like to use these as decorations or tree ornaments, and it is not uncommon to see them spray painted or dipped in glitter.
If you squint your eyes it’s easy to see faces in them, so I enhanced the effect by playing with saturation, contrast, and a few other variables to make this grouping look like a spooky wooden caterpillar.
Speaking of faces, here’s a ghostly looking old Black Walnut shell (Juglans nigra) lying among some gum drops, giving the collection an appropriately autumnal feel:
Perfect for fall – enchanting detail/color balance.
My thought exactly: very autumnal. Great pix!
Beautiful. This time of year these unsung gems of nature are all around us, even under our feet.
Interesting pictures! You do a great job at showing the hidden and artistic beauty in these natural objects.
The sweetgum looks similar to the cluster of Corylus sp nuts…
Very nice! Now I feel like going for a walk outside. I have a little collection of dry fruits at my house—it’s hard to resist looking for the perfect specimen to take home.
Nice to see someone besides me who loves to collect “ordinary” seed pods. All seed pods are interesting. I have dozens from trees of the tropics that I collected all over Latin America…as well as a dried Protea large leafy seed from South Africa. I got them through customs though I suspect it may be illegal to do so. But they make a nice varied collection in my home. Oh yes, I forgot: they sat there quietly for decades but once, years ago, I was sitting nearby and suddenly heard this VERY LOUD CRACK/POP. One of the extremely hard seeds, probably from the Caribbean, had popped open and threw itself across the room! This was literally years after I collected it. Something in its history told it that it was time to pop open ! And it was an extremely hard nut shell, seemingly indestructible. But nature told it: it’s time !!!
Thank you for unveiling the hidden beauty of fruits and seeds!