where lilies grow

If I might see another Spring, I’d not plant summer flowers and wait: I’d have my crocuses at once, My leafless pink mezereons, My chill-veined snow-drops, choicer yet My white or azure violet, Leaf-nested primrose; anything To blow at once, not late. ~ Christina Rossetti

[lily-gardens]

Hi everyone, call me Lily [30s, she/they], and this is where I'm going to be putting most of my gardening and nature photography and plant knowledge reblogs from here on! 💚

I follow from @lily-leaves

Tags below the cut

Common tags:

Lily adventures - text posts about my interactions with bugs or critters etc, or places I visit besides my general area

Lily says things - text posts about advice gardening etc that I make or comment on

my gardens - any plants I've been caretaking myself

my photography - usually more broad landscapes and skies

plant friends - a plant not in my own garden(s)

bug friends - any insect/bug (I will also tag "spiders" and "bees" and "wasps" - lmk if you want any other bugs tagged specifically)

I will probably also add type of bug with tags like: arachnids, apoideans, lepidopterans, odonatopterans, etc.

And if you do/don't want to see flying stingy things (bees/wasps/etc) my tag for that is now "apiphilia", so block it if necessary!

seasonal houseguests - my monarchs, both butterflies and caterpillars

critter neighbors - things like lizards, frogs, chipmunks, birds, footprints from the foxes if I see them, etc

And then for reblogs:

a garden is a poem - poems and pretty quotations etc about gardens and plants and pollinators

gardening - garden plans/advice/etc

permaculture - like it says on the tin

foraging

rewilding

plants

insects

pollinators

biodiversity

[gefdreamsofthesea]

Took a picture of this bug on a daisy, thought it was a bee but it doesn't fly like a bee and it's very brown, insect ID app says it is a fly? Have I fallen for mimicry?

[1five1two]

Speiredonia spectans, the granny's cloak moth, is a moth of the family Erebidae.

[lily-gardens]

That last wasp post almost made me get up and go outside and see if the lady buzzing around my office window yesterday has built herself the beginnings of a nest... And then I remembered I got two weather alerts for extreme heat and an air quality alert for the damn fireworks and I'm currently off my allergy meds because of an appt next week...

Indoors. We are staying indoors today...

[oh-he-grows]

there was a wasp limping on my garage steps so I had to give her some honey to help her on her way

[asincereoffering]

62926

[botanyshitposts]

just saw a sunflower in an urban garden that was so big i had to look up to see the top of it. stem the thickness of my forearm. they had it tied to an electrical pole with a length of twine to keep it balanced. leaves like TWO dinner plates, ten or more alternating pairs, jack and the beanstalk type shit, no sign of stopping. a tree is a somewhat ambiguous growth form botanically speaking and that IS a tree to me

[an-ruraiocht]

like did you know that trees lower the surface temperature by up to 19° and grass by up to 24°... access to green space is access to safety in a climate crisis and it is a massive site of inequality because poorer areas tend to have less green space and thus get hotter. urban trees are an equality issue as well as a climate issue. sorry it's not a magic bullet that solves everything but sometimes you need to pick an issue that helps a bit and focus on that. this might not be yours. it's likely going to be mine in the future when my health issues allow me to take it on. if we each pick a thing we can make a difference

[kedreeva]

It looks like just pinpricks of lights flicking off and on. It's some of the hundreds to thousands of fireflies in my yard, after years of fostering their environment.

It's come a long way since I moved in. It used to be that I could stand in the yard during firefly season and count 30+ seconds before seeing a flash. It's still not at the level I remember seeing in local areas a couple decades ago, when fields would practically glow with how many fireflies lit the air above them. But it's not nothing. And maybe my yard doesn't make a huge difference on its own, but when you multiply it by hundreds, by thousands, by millions... it adds up.

Did you know it takes years, multiple, for firefly larvae to mature into beetles? You won't see immediate, drastic effects if you start trying to help them. But when you believe in the long game, you'll see it improve over time. I don't have to wait 30 seconds to see the glow of a firefly in my yard anymore. In fact I can't count seconds anymore. There's always a light on.

[batsandboba]

do not start gambling. go outside and locate a bug. now post it on inaturalist. bam. nature's gacha game

[s2g]

[uncharismatic-fauna]

A freshly peeled bug!

[xanaxfarts]

Kristina Šeniauskienė’s garden

[muffinworry]

Hey don't cry, okay? We just found Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a species thought to be extinct for the past 60 years.

[1968bullittmustang]

Attenborough’s echidna rediscovered by combining Indigenous knowledge with camera-trapping - npj Biodiversity

We confirm the ‘rediscovery’ of Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi), one of only five modern egg-laying mammals and

[mecha-cthulhu]

So Sir David Attenborough was already a well known naturalist(the docementary kind, not the nudist kind) in 1961 to have an animal named after him, then lived 60 years thinking the animal went extinct and now lives to see evidence of it not being extinct. That is both incredibly heartwarming and a very Elf-core thing of him to do. He truly is an archdruid

[markscherz]

You've heard about Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature… but have you heard about Zig zag‽

[Miralles et al. 2026 CC BY-NC 4.0]

A few weeks ago, friends and colleagues of mine (I was not involved) published this incredible new species of legless skink that makes distinctive zig-zag markings in the sand as it 'swims' through it.

[Miralles et al. 2026 CC BY-NC 4.0]

So they called it Zig zag.

ZIG ZAG, CORAL!

Gosh I love this new era of whimsy-driven taxonomy.

[havingapoemwithyou]

love for other things by Tom Hennen

[morbidology]

This is a Venezuelan Poodle Moth and is a relatively new species of moth discovered by Dr. Arthur Anker in the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela.