Yucca flowers, cottonwood seeds

The yuccas are blooming.  A little past their prime by now, maybe, but still in bloom.  They normally blend in with all the grassy plants and weeds, but now each individual yucca plant is clearly visible.  In the field they only grow in any numbers on the hill, and in the area of the prairie dog town, which is a little higher than the rest of the field.  Maybe it has something to do with the soil -- could it be too moist in the center of the field? -- or maybe the rest of the field is too weed dominated for them to grow.  They're interesting plants pretty common in this region.  They appear as a rosette of long, stiff leaves with very pointy ends that grow upward and outward, forming a protective hemisphere surrounding a central, woody stalk.  Right now that stalk is covered in flowers, which, like the rest of the plant, are a little unusual.  They're large, succulent flowers that tend to hang downward from the stalk and whose every feature -- petals, pistil, and stamens -- shares a creamy, off-white color.  And a close look reveals that they're ecosystems.  Many are covered in aphids (or some kind of little sap sucking bug anyway) and with these primary consumers I also saw secondary consumers in the form of lady bugs, some of whom were mating.  Come to think of it, I saw a little moth escape from one of the flowers when I held it up for a look -- I wonder if it was one of those moths mentioned in the article!  Later in the summer they'll harden in to brown seed pods, which will split open in the fall, spilling little dark disk-shaped seeds on the ground.

The cottonwoods are already releasing their seeds, and have been for a week or two.  Cottony tufts carry their tiny seeds through the air, and when the wind blows the air is filled with them.  I drove under a tree the other day that was dropping so many sees that it almost looked like it was snowing.  This has always been a whimsical feature of early summer to me.