A few things

I've just spent the day in the garden working on step one of a bamboo project that will take another day at least, and I'm pretty much exhausted. I'll post about that project tomorrow, but today is a day to catch up with a few interesting things I've seen recently.

Insects, flowers, and an arachnid probably named Eric. Let's take a look.

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First up, remember how a week or two ago I posted about my black stemmed taro flowering? I was surprised about that at the time, but I'm even more surprised now, as a couple of my other "Elephant Ears" are flowering now too. Here's my Colocasia gigantea, which I haven't grown before:

The most surprising is the Colocasia esculenta though, as one of them is flowering now too:

I've been growing these for a couple of years, but haven't had one flower before. This is the only one of 5 large plants I have, and is the only one of those 5 flowering. I wonder what's different?


Next up is this grasshopper that's been hanging around on my deck. This day he was on the bamboo (Hibanobambusa tranquillans 'Shiroshima' if you're interested) which gave me a clear look at him:

Notice that his eye is the color of his body with a small black dot. Insects must have irises or some other mechanism that allows varying amounts of light in, because I've come outside at night with a flashlight looking for praying mantises before, and their eyes have been completely black.


Finally, this unfortunate spider:

I'm not sure how he lost all of the legs on his one side -- was he attacked by another spider or bird and got lucky? Was he in a bad spot when I closed the screen door? I doubt he will be surviving much longer... spiders can't regrow legs, can they? It must be pretty difficult to move, and catching food must be impossible. Poor Eric!