Longtime Michpics followers will recognize Joel’s name and may remember his enduring photo series of a Flower a Day for February. It’s now the 20th year of one of my favorite Michigan photographers dedicating an entire month to helping folks feel better about a hard time of year. Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you!
Longtime Michigan in Pictures supporter Joel Dinda knows that the struggle to stay sunny is real in Michigan, so once again he is sharing A Flower a Day for February in the Michigan in Pictures group on Facebook! Check it out and follow along with Joel’s travels near & far in our group!
Joel’s Flower a Day for February project began with a flower a day for January of 2006 2013 and then (because February usually isn’t warm enough to grow lilies) moved to February for 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
This morning I got a note from one of Michigan in Pictures’s longtime contributors, Joel Dinda letting me know that I had coincidentally featured his photos twice on previous January 5ths. The other two were Rotten Apples: 2014 Detroit Lions Playoff Edition detailing the Lions’ loss to Dallas after the pass interference call that was and then wasn’t and a look at the Ruins of the the Old Cheboygan Point Lighthouse in 2013.
The third time is the charm they say, so here’s one that Joel shared way back in January of 2006 (taken summer of 2005) as part of his “Flower a Day” series. I think he started doing them in January and then realized somewhere along the way that as bad as Michigan winter in January can be, Februarys are worse!!
One of my favorite things about Michigan in Pictures is that sometimes I learn things that I really am not intending to learn. Such is the case today when I picked my favorite of Joel’s photos to highlight this year’s edition of his perennial feature, A Flower a Day for January. Joel started this in January of 2006, and every day he posts another flower to his flickr photostream.
The Wikipedia entry for Geranium sanguineum explains that it’s the county flower of Northumberland, commonly called Bloody Cranesbill or Bloody Geranium. The Geranium entry says that the genus name is derived from the Greek géranos meaning crane) and has a note:
The genus name is derived from the Greek γέρανος, géranos (meaning crane). The English name “cranesbill” derives from the appearance of the fruit capsule of some of the species. Species in the Geranium genus have a distinctive mechanism for seed dispersal. This consists of a beak-like column which springs open when ripe and casts the seeds some distance. The fruit capsule consists of five cells each containing one seed, joined to a column produced from the centre of the old flower. The common name cranesbill comes from the shape of the un-sprung column, which in some species is long and looks like the bill of a crane. Many species in this genus do not have a long beak-like column.
…Confusingly, “geranium” is also the common name of members of the genus Pelargonium (commonly known as ‘storksbill’ in distinction from ‘cranesbill’), which are also in the Geraniaceae family. Linnaeus (Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus) originally included all the species in one genus, Geranium, but they were later separated into two genera by Charles L’Héritier in 1789.
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