Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The True Book of Weeds and Wild Flowers by Illa Podendorf


The title makes you wonder if there was a infestation of books giving false information at the time. The true book editors saw a need for some truthful books and bam! a series was born. 

I love wildflowers. They are one of my great delights in life. Picking flowers to use in book pictures made me deliriously happy this past weekend. (Just ask Justin. I was bouncing around asking him to just look at how cute these are! And how white these ones are! And did  you notice....? I am easily entertained.) As much as I love flowers, I very rarely pick a bunch for the house. I generally spy the flowers I want when I am either walking a mile or two from home or driving along 10 minutes late for where I am supposed to be. Neither is conducive to gathering bunches of flowers and getting them home before they droop. But this Sunday afternoon, I went for a flower picking expedition and picked to my hearts content. Rain had just fallen, so everything was fresh and dewy looking. 

Happy sigh....


Loving wildflowers and plants as I do, it is obvious why I like this book. It is a pretty simple, but useful introduction to plant science and wildflowers.


Some-of-the-time weeds vs. all-of-the-time weeds. 


We have already discussed how much I love dandelions. 


Queen Anne's Lace--happiness! 


Grasses.... I find grasses fascinating. There are so many different varieties. I actually decided to get a biology/botany degree because of the wide variety of grass types. That and a desire to know wildflower names. No, it doesn't really make sense to me either. But it is true!





Early Spring Wildflowers


Ironically, only one of all the flowers I picked is in this book. 


There it is--Trillium! For the longest time, I thought picking trillium was illegal in New York. But a two second google search said it was only illegal to pick the red trillium. I am relying on that two second google search being accurate. 



Summer and autumn flowers



You can't really read this page, but it is an impassioned plea to leave wildflowers alone. Do not pick them to decorate your house. Or for photo props.

The irony kills me.

I take comfort in the fact there are thousands more where these came from. 

But don't pick Lady's slippers. 

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