Meadow salsify

I follow them on Instagram.

And I love tragopogans, you know, the meadow salsify, the standard Tragopogon pratensis.

Um, I remember it turning up in my mum's garden, and that massive, as we call it in Norfolk, Billy Buster seed head, you know, the big dandelion clock, and the fact that the flowers open kind of fleetingly in the morning.

Uh, a- another reason to love it, the, the meadow salsify's common name, Jack Go-To-Bed-At-Noon, I think, because the flowers close.

Anyway, so I'm a big tragopogan fan, and when my feed, I was scrolling through and along came a tragopogan I didn't know, this sort of chocolatey purple, not the normal purple of the meadow salsify.

It's really chocolatey, but with like a tiny yellowy tinge to the edge of the petals, some yellowy green in the middle.

I, I gotta have me this.

And, um, he, Hill is saying it's, you know, it's, it is everywhere, and this is something that people are using to tell time.

And then I, I came across another one from the 1880s about a plant called Jack Go-to-Bed-at-Noon, Tragopogon pratensis or goat's beard.

Um, and that turned up in a, a parking lot outside our building, um, and started doing its thing.

It did what I ex-- I mean, my completely unscientific b- uh, amateur botany.