Almost Friday!

It's going to be a fun weekend- the boys want to go see Russell Crowe v/s King John in "Robin Hood", so hopefully we'll get to eat some popcorn and enjoy one of the world's greatest inventions: the movie theatre. Sunday we're having some friends over for brunch, so house and yard cleaning are in the near future no doubt. Time to mow the weeds, I mean grass. I'm also looking forward to Saturday, when we have our annual Duke Gardens staff barbecue in Bahama at my family property. The summer interns are starting next week, so we'll get to meet them for the first time at the party. Fishing, barbecue, volleyball, botanizing... always a good time.

A plant to watch for in the coming weeks in the Blomquist is on the rise, literally. There is a Lilium superbum (Turks Cap Lily) that currently stands at seven feet tall as of this morning. Last year it produced eight stunning orange explosions with black freckles. This year it seems to have taken it to a new level, and I fully expect ten to twelve blossoms and an ultimate height of over eight feet. I'm including a photo of one of last years flowers to get you interested. To keep tabs on it, you can find it near the waterfall amongst the Rhododendron maximum in the wildlife garden. To see exactly where that is, print the grid map from the "What's Blooming" page of the Blomquist Website and make a mark in J5. It will probably be another two weeks before it's in bloom, so take advantage of the intervening time to watch the flowers emerge. Whenever you see a plants name in a different color on the blog, click on it and it will take you to a page on the USDA website for that species. This is the site from which I verify all my nomenclature, provenance (where a plant originates from), etc. for all my record keeping. Scroll down to view a range map for the species, and then click on individual states to see in what counties that species is found in the wild.