These
are some of the items my brothers and sisters and I would collect in
the neighborhood.
Clockwise from top left:
1) an osage orange (monkeyball)
2) Two fruits of the horse chestnut tree. The fruit is kind of just like the husk for the enormous seed inside, the buckeye, also known as the horse chestnut..
3) a pine cone
4 )an acorn
5) two buckeyes
6) a maple tree 'helicopter' which, when split, make two maple tree 'noses'
7)
a ginko tree leaf.
I
recently learned that there is a game that children play with buckeyes
in England!
They call buckeyes
'conkers.' Read about how to play the game by
clicking this link.
And here are some silly seed creatures!
I was walking in my neighborhood in February, when I noticed these furry seed pods on a vine.
Here is a close up of the seed pods.
They are furry! I didn't know what
they were for sure. I took one home.
I put the pod on a table in my front hall. In the middle of the night, I heard a big CLATTER!!! in the house. What could it be??? In the morning I noticed that the pod had dried out and split open, and the seeds were all over the floor, up to six feet away! I learned that these are wisteria seeds and when the sun dries out the pods they warp and split open and 'shoot' their seeds all over!! That would be exciting to see. I noticed that the seed pods on the fence are all split open now (end of March). I will post a photo of the wisteria in bloom later in the year.
This is a photo of the wisteria blooming on May 19.
