bloomers...

...in my yard, popping up out of the accumulated leaf mulch, in places I have no memory of planting them: bright red spider lily blooms. When I did a little research, I found another common name is 'hurricane lily', because they come up in the early fall, during the season of hurricanes in the southeast. The plants come up from bulbs, so they are tend to appear in unexpected places: you forget from year to year where you put the bulbs in the ground - then they shoot up on tall slender stalks, with no foliage, and this amazing bloom seems to suddenly open overnight - which is why they are also called 'surprise lilies'.

When I returned home on Thursday evening, from travels to Virginia, avoiding the seriously bad weather along the Atlantic Coast in VA and the Carolinas, I noticed dozens of stalks had appeared since I left home on Monday. And saw on Friday that many of them had opened up overnight: almost instantaneously. Like those amazing recordings you see on nature shows, where a bloom that takes hours or days to fully open is shown at an altered speed, reaching full flower in seconds instead of hours.

I expect with a little rainfall as it blows in from the east, they will all pop open in the next day or two. Grasshoppers seem to love them, will gnaw through the stalks and topple the bloom just as it is beginning to put on a show. Causing me to be especially diligent when I see those nasty black insects hopping across the lawn or driveway, chasing them down to be the executioner. It is especially gratifying to stomp a pair when they are attempting to reproduce. Euwwwh!

Even though I have nothing to base it on, I am of the opinion that the hoppers lay their eggs in the foliage of these plants, which is why so many tiny ones can be seen as they hatch out in the early summer. It would be most entertaining to see a video of me jumping around in the yard, trying to stomp all the little ones as the scatter under attack. But I try to get them when they are young, less than an inch long, before they can grow to full size and reproduce as well as eat my spider lily plants before they bloom. These creatures are so unwelcome at my house, I always think 'plagues of Egypt' when they start hatching out, wee little things hopping around in the pine straw mulch. I saw a couple of stalks yesterday that had been chewed through and destroyed by those disgusting bugs, proving I had not completely eliminated the pests: plus it only takes two to create hundreds of the next generation.

I started counting the number of stalks I could see all over, out under the leaf mulch, where they have been planted and multiplied over many years. You know I am tragically math impaired, right? When I got to two hundred I quit trying to number them all. I am so looking forward to seeing them open up in the near future, and bloom gloriously by the dozens, all over the place. Oh, wow!