Nature Notes: Hot summer days

The cardinal below trying to beat the heat with a dip in the bird bath cracked me up. Looks like she's having a bad hair day but considering what my hair looks like after a swim I'm not one to speak.I always like to see signs of the next season far in advance of its arrival. The pecans below won't be ready until fall (autumn) but they are already beginning to show up in the tree.Another signal of the next season are the green dogwood berries. I think they usually turn red around October and I never paid that much attention to them at their green stage before.
More and more blackberries are ripening and ending up both in my mouth as well as in the birds hungry beaks.I never tire of the purple cone flowers (echinacea). They are at so many stages throughout my garden.
I have taken echinacea supplements to fend off colds but I've never tried to harvest my plants.
I've read that the root extracts are the part that have the most medicinal benefit although something certainly seemed to enjoy the petals on the flower above.
Bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and even american goldfinch like to feast on the coneflower center.
I think I like the newly forming coneflowers about as much as I like the more colorful stages.
I've enjoyed photographing the grass seeds and plumes and there are often visitors like the one below.
If you look through the grass plumes there is a rose lurking in the middle of the shot below. That rose bush over time is in an increasingly shady part of the garden but the roses haven't gotten the memo that they aren't supposed to thrive in shade. So far they are doing just fine.The grass below is a weed and I guess I should pull it up before the seeds are viable but I thought it looked pretty interesting in a macro shot. Also, the birds will probably enjoy the seeds so I may let it be like everything else.I was pleased to see some cleome is coming up this year. I used to have it all over the place and it sets its seeds, returning in the spring and summer. However, one of our droughts seemed to eliminate all the cleome so I was please to see that some of the seeds must have stayed viable for a couple of years returning after all the rain we had this year. I'm pretty sure I didn't have any last year so that's the only explanation I can come up with.I don't know the name of the yellow wildflower below but I think it's pretty.
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