Lesson 144: The Dandelion, Lesson 131: The Composite Flower, & Lesson 188: The Dogwood

The boys find it more comfortable to draw and paint inside at a table than outside. (Katie and I prefer outside.) I think that it is simply that they are too distracted outside. We brought three flowers inside to paint. Two flowers are review as we have studied them before: the dandelion and the Purple Dead Nettle. The dandelion is a composite flower in the Aster/Sunflower Family. A composite flower is a collection of many flowers gathered together in one flower. Quentin enjoyed looking at the "Lion's Tooth" leaves and James noticed the curly bracts under the flower head.

The Purple Dead Nettle is very abundant here, so much so that the fields turn a purple color. It is a member of the Mint Family, has square stalks, opposite leaves and tiny purple flowers. The bottom leaves are green, but they become increasingly tinged with purple until the crown leaves which are almost totally purple.

Our new study was the Dogwood. Being flowers of trees, the stems of these flowers are woody and have opposite leaves and showy bracts. What we think of as the petals are actually bracts and the flowers are really the centers, and are like the composite flowers in that they are several flowers clumped together in the center, each with four of their own petals,and "four chubby, greenish yellow anther set on filaments which lift them up between the petals; at the center of it all is the tiny green pistil." HNS, p. 681