November flowers
After our first hard frost, I gave up on flowers in my area for 2022. A visit to a community garden proved me wrong, with these orange calendula and pepperweed blossoms:
Seeing the vivid orange in early November was a surprise, so was the halictid bee. The bee wandered lazily around the flower for a while. The white flower was quite small, I believe it’s in the mustard family, perhaps Lepidium virginicum. If that’s the correct ID, it’s native to North America, and spread to Europe and Asia where it is non-native. So many of our non-native plants are the reverse!
I’m going to have to try calendula in my garden next year – it’s hardier than zinnia.
Nature Diary 
The dark bee against the rich orange is effective.
Both the flower and the bee were such a surprise in the midst of the start of brown season. Thank!
A few minutes ago, before looking at any posts this morning, I was thinking that Steve Gingold calls this stick season. And now I hear you calling it brown season,
Stick season is a good term for it. I think of brown because most of the green turns brown. And then with snow, it’s a brown and white season.
So gorgeous black and orange during the fall.
In France too, the weather was hot and there was flowers in apple trees in october ! Never seen…
Thanks! The weather here flips from cold and back to mild. Flowering apples in October is quite a sight.
I’m not always fond of orange flowers, but these are lovely. I couldn’t remember coming across them, so I looked them up on the Houston gardening sites and found that they’re considered a good winter flower here, like pansies and snapdragons. The image with the bee is delightful, and the tiny white flower’s quite appealing. It must have been pure pleasure to come across the blooms at this time of year.
Pure pleasure is what it was, to find the rich orange, then the bee, and the little pepperweed to top it off.
Just ordered calendula seed for planting next year 🙂