left over clouds from a night of rain: easy breeze: 69ºF

Days of drenching rain have left behind a crop of mushrooms and fungi. I’ve never made the effort to put names to the things, so I can’t tell this from that. This morning I found this spiked mushroom growing through the rain-soaked mulch. Since its shape was so distinctive, it was easy to find it on google images. Now I know it’s called a ‘Stinkhorn.’ Flies and gnats are supposed to like the smell, but to us humans it’s likely to smell like rotting flesh. This morning the telltale odor must have been dulled by the dampness because I didn’t smell a thing even from about a foot away. Stinkhorns are supposed to be edible, but who’d what to? The mushrooms need flies to spread. As the flies eat the mushroom’s flesh, the spores stick to their legs and bodies and then get flown to new places.

I found that people who have stinkhorns around their homes or gardens are not as neutral about them as I can be. My involvement with them is to stoop down, take their picture and then move on. However, a home owner who has a healthy crop of them spouting outside his backdoor posted a note on GardenWeb calling them “horrid little things.” Another was disgusted with all the websites that found these “Demon fungi enjoyable or fascinating.” NIMBY rules here too I guess.

I had no luck in naming these white mushrooms growing among the knees of the bald Cyprus trees. They’re meaty looking – much more appealing than the stinkhorns. From a distance they look as though they have flat tops. Up close I can see that the tops look like cones of well-weathered volcanoes.

Many of the dogwoods are covered with holly-red berries. Since the berries are still here, it’s a good bet that the flocks of migrating robins and cedar waxwings that make this botanical garden a stop on their way south haven’t arrived. Holly berries, winterberries, and dogwood berries will be hard to find after the traveling birds have passed through. If I were a local robin, I wonder what I’d think of my fly-by relatives that stop here just long enough to feast on the food that I was counting on to help me make it through the winter.


There’s a small patch of cotton in the home garden section of this botanical garden. This morning it looked like one of those Dutch still-life paintings of vases filled with lush flowers that could never be blooming at the same time. The cotton plants here are sporting a three season display -- flowering blossoms, tight bolls, and cotton bolls open and ready to be harvested.

Just outside the lower entrance to the Kemper Center for Home Gardening are two large container pots. Each has a different specie of a shrub named Mussaenda. It’s a sure bet that they’re here only for the summer because my garden encyclopedia Flora says Mussaendas are native to the wetter equatorial parts of Africa and Asia. One of the shrubs is named ‘Red Flag’ (Mussaenda erythrophylla); the other: ‘Virgin Tree’ (Mussaenda philippica). The attraction grabbers of both plants are their oversized, bright sepals. Red Flag is said to have gotten its name because of its bright red sepals that jut from the flowers in different directions and wave in the wind.

Virgin Tree, a native of the Philippines, has smaller cream-colored sepals that are less prominent than the Red Flags. Better blooms though – lots of custard colored yellow star within a star flowers. In the tropics, Mussaendas can reach 15 to 30 feet tall and they never stop blooming. Makes me wonder why I stay here in the Midwest.