Ground cherries grow almost wherever there is ground. We have two species in the area; both produce edible fruit inside their little Japanese lanterns, although it’s not usually much good until a week or two after it falls off the plant. (The papery lantern is toxic, so don’t eat it.) These pictures are of Physalis pubescens.
The flowers face downward and so are easily missed, but they’re worth examining closer. The color is primrose yellow with mahogany splotches around the center. They look like little Tiffany lanpshades, almost always held wide open and parallel to the ground.
Touch-me-nots, or jewelweeds, are some of our most common roadside flowers, and few flowers are more delightful. Close relatives of the garden Impatiens plants that seemed to have taken over the nurseries a few years back, they grow in vast colonies along the edge of the woods.
There are two common species in the eastern United States. Impatins pallida, which grows in the north and at higher elevations, has yellow flowers; Impatiens capensis (or Impatiens fulva), which grows in the south and at lower elevations, has bright orange flowers. Pittsburgh is right on the border of their ranges, so we get both, sometimes thoroughly mixed in the same colony. These pictures are all of Impatiens pallida.
The name “touch-me-not” comes from the explosive properties of the seedpods. If you touch a ripe seedpod, it will suddenly explode and send seeds flying in all directions. (The explosion is harmless, of course, but very amusing to children.) The secret is in the tense fibers of the pod, which, when the thin membrane that holds them together is ruptured, curl instantly into little coiled springs. You can tell a pod is ripe when you can see the black seeds through the thin green membrane.
The flowers are perfectly adapted for pollination by bumblebees. Each flower is almost exactly the size of a bumblebee; what the bee wants is far back in the spur of the flower, so that the bee must enter the flower completely and then withdraw, laden with pollento fertilize the next flower.
The old custom house in Pittsburgh as it appeared in 1857, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. In the middle nineteenth centuy, Pittsburgh was making its transition from a rather grubby industrial town to a magnificently grubby metropolis; note the difference in scale between the custom house and its neighbors.
The companion to the Fort Pitt Bridge, the Fort Duquesne Bridge crosses the Allegheny, giving the Point a pair of golden wings. The picture was taken with a Kodak Retinette.
As seen across the river, Heinz Field, where the Steelers and the Panthers play, is pleasingly symmetrical. The side facing the river is left open to give the television cameras an occasional view of the skyline.
Weekend crowds throng Point Park in the early-evening sun. Taken with a Kodak Retinette, whose tidy German precision, with a Schneider-Kreuznach lens and Compur-Rapid shutter, makes it a pleasure to take on a walk in the city.
This little corner of the Diamond (the Diamond is called “Market Square” on maps) looks like the Pittsburgh of olden times, before steel-cage construction made skyscrapers sprout everywhere. Taking away the neon and the road signs, it could be a Victorian engraving. Father Pitt begs your forgiveness for the cheap lens on this digital camera, which makes straight lines impossible. (Update: With better software, we have been able to eliminate most of the distortion. For comparison, the original image is reproduced below.)