The heat let up just enough for me to cut down a rogue copy of my wild rose bush. After getting my hand stabbed and picking out bits of thorn from my fingers, I’m leaning toward thinking it’s a Prickly Rose. While I was cutting it down and hacking it up, I found all sorts of curious little treasures stuck to the undersides of the leaves.
The snail isn’t exactly a treasure, but it’s small enough and round enough to invoke a word I’ve been using a lot lately: cute.
The most mysterious one is the tiny green balls I found on a few leaves. I think they’re galls, formed by a tiny wasp that lays its eggs in the leaf, to which the leaf responds by forming a growth around them. They don’t seem anything like the most common rose galls, mossy rose galls, which is too bad, as they’re pretty cool looking.
But the treasure is the ladybug pupa. With luck, there’s an adult forming inside, and it might emerge soon.
Whatever they are, it’s all in a jar with a mesh on top. We’ll see if anything comes out.
Writing Every Day 