My Weekend Communing With Nature

This weekend, we spent most of our time outdoors. On Saturday, we pulled weeds, trimmed shrubs, repositioned the rocks around our pond's waterfall, and tried to kill as many Japanese beetles as possible.

We always have beautiful dragonflies and damselflies at our pond. I decided to take a break from my work and photograph two of them. This Blue Dasher was amusing, in that he always came back to land on the same daylily bud!

This Twelve-Spotted Skimmer darted here and there, catching insects on the wing, but tended to land on our rocks, or on the rushes in the center of the pond. Here he is on a daylily stem.

Our "Nikko Blue" hydrangea turns a beautiful shade of blue in acidic soil. Unfortunately, the soil around here is much to alkaline, so unless I add some aluminum sulfate to the soil every year, our "blue" hydrangea turns a wimpy pinkish-purple! As you can see, this year, I forgot to amend the soil!

Nikko Blue Hydrangea

Our lilies have finished blooming...

...but not the daylilies, garden phlox, hydrangeas, and many of our other perennials:

Monarda "Jacob Cline"

Monarda "Blue Stocking"

Phlox "Barthirtythree"

Daylilies "Hyperion"

Daylilies -hemerocallis fulva

"Annabelle" hydrangea

Potentilla "Miss Wilmot"

Liatris spicata

Lady's Mantle

Coreopsis "Zagreb"

Gooseneck Loosestrife

Purple Coneflowers

On Sunday, we took a guided nature walk in a nearby fen with our friends Teresa and Kim. A fen is a wetland area where water seeps from glacial formations. Limestone gravel left by the moving glaciers below the ground makes the water alkaline.

our guide discusses the milkweed plant

We saw some of the low areas where the seepage occurs. You have to be very careful walking in the fen, because there is quicksand!

The ground is a floating mass of peat. We saw many types of grasses, sedges, cattails and prairie wildflowers. The fen we visited is 260 acres. Volunteers are trying to restore it to its original state. There are many species that are not native, and it's difficult to eradicate them.

Hoary Vervain

Prairie Thistle

Our guide told tales of children lost forever in the tall prairie grasses as early pioneers moved westward across America.

We also saw interesting insects, like this Widow Skimmer dragonfly...

... and this beautiful Red-Spotted Purple butterfly!

It was a great weekend, enjoying the beautiful weather in northern Illinois!

For more information, visit Teresa's blog or Chicago Wilderness Magazine.