This last week of January 2026 has been foggy and wet and berry-and-leaf colourful.

Seeing the two leaders of a tall (60 to 70 ft.) northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) outlined by the fog was awesome. Meanwhile, the fog horns blew all night for a couple of nights.

Moisture clung to this grass one early morning.

And the same morning, moisture still speckled the silvery leaves on this silver ragwort display assembled in planters outside a condo. I learned from Missouri Botanical Garden’s plant finder that silver ragwort is a herbaceous tender perennial from north Africa. Its scientific name is Jacobaea maritima and it is best known for its winter foliage, which lasts until the first frost.

I observed two orange cotoneaster plants: one growing as a sheared mound and the other as an unsheared shrub. The picture is of the one allowed to grow unsheared. It makes me wonder whether this cotoneaster has the common name of orange because of its red berries or its orange leaves in the fall. Its scientific name is Cotoneaster franchetii; Adrien René Franchet was a French botanist who died in 1900 aged 65, “noted for his extensive work describing the flora of China and Japan, based on the collections made by French Catholic missionaries in China, Armand David, Pierre Jean Marie Delavay, Paul Guillaume Farges, Paul-Hubert Perny, Jean-André Soulié, and others,” according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrien_Ren%C3%A9_Franchet). C. franchetii is native to western China and Tibet.