Name that plant! Two down, two to go

Various queries and googlings have identified two of my mystery plants: The Death Star with the insect is common button bush (thanks, momomom); and googling gave me "morningstar sedge" for the other. Now for two more.

The first one makes me think of penstemon, but I've never seen that particular two-tone effect before. The second one is another "tip of my tongue" plant that will probably make me slap my forehead for idiocy.




Edit: a FB friend identified the first one as woodland pinkroot -- Spigelia marilandica.)
I took the second one for an allium, until I got home and saw that the flowery bits have five petal-like thingies instead of six. Otherwise I would have photographed the entire plant, to show leaves and such.

A day of small accomplishments

It has been a day of small but satisfying accomplishments.

The front window boxes had gotten pretty seedy. Literally -- the second year feverfew had bolted, bloomed, and set seed prolifically with some new plants also coming on. The pansies had died back and looked like untidy straw between the center bushes and the feverfew. I had some plants started as rooted cuttings out back for the window boxes:

• Ipomoea batata
  
• Tradescantia pallida
  
• Many varieties of coleus, from which I selected two
  

At the last minute, on impulse, I also stuck in a couple of scented pelargoniums, those ones with minuscule magenta flowers.

The transplants in the window boxes were looking a little peaky, so I've decided to keep them out back in full shade for a day or two until they show some signs of recovery.

I also folded and put away laundry -- not only this weekend's, but the dregs of several weeks' batches that never got put away.

I took some pictures of things in the back and uploaded them to Flickr.

And I found out it is dead easy to copy tunes from my hard drive to my Blackberry -- but not until I went round Robin Hood's barn doing silly things that Verizon wants me to do so that I'll burn minutes. No thank you...

I am trying to decide whether or not I actually like listening to music on my Blackberry. On the one hand, it's interesting to have Roy Orbison resonating right inside my head. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want Roy Orbison getting into my head any further than he already is. But I also found I can plug the Blackberry into the pair of inexpensive speakers I bought to go with the Netbook and take the whole jury-rigged sound system out back, where it sounds remarkably like a transistor radio, for the full retro effect.