Sex in the woods

[vaneramos]

One miracle about the Canon PowerShot is the opportunity to see places the eye cannot see. The moveable viewer enables the camera to descend to ground level, or over heads, and still find the desired focal point. Speed and aperture controls render the invisible visible.

The Asarum canadense flower is not the most artistic photo I took yesterday, but most interesting. These innocuous blooms lie on the ground, half-covered with leaf litter, brownish corolla enclosing a mysterious dark hole. But opening the camera lens, it reveals sex organs (thanks, apel).

I had gone seeking my favourite indigenous flowering shrub, Dirca palustris, which unfortunately was past. Damn global warming until next spring. But other woodland ephemerals were evident in their muted glory. I was going to say "modest glory," however there's nothing demure about a Sanguinaria bud oozing raindrops.

As for the mystery photo, finch_bear wins by identifying the leaf of Erythronium americanus, trout-lily, dogtooth violet. that_dang_otter gave the best guess by a Westerner: a member of the lily family, at least. What detail the macro offers! I thought it resembled an amphibian skin. missprune wins "most imaginative" for suggesting, "part of a beetle."

Its flowers were clenched tight against drizzle.