Wednesday, 7:30 AM. 69 degrees, wind WSW, calm. The channel is slightly wrinkled, the sky is mostly cloudy, and .9” of rain has fallen in the past 24 hours. The barometer predicts partly cloudy skies.
David Eades of the Chamber staff, and a pretty good botanist himself, brought a mystery plant from Ashland for me to identify a week ago. It has entire, toothless, opposite leaves and four white petals. Floral parts in fours usually mean it is in the Cruciferae (cross-like flowers) family and I identified it tentatively as the old-fashioned garden Lunaria, silver-dollar plant. David didn’t think it that, and his visiting mother-in-law immediately recognized it by its orangey fragrance as mock orange (Philadelphus coronarius, in the Scrophularia family). Had I used my nose as well as my eyes I would have recognized it also. A lesson well learned; use all your senses or you may well outsmart yourself.
The photo is of a mock orange, native to Asia-minor and long cultivated, growing right under my nose on Eleventh Street.
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