It must be fall. I think I just saw foliage.
I also noticed this odd-looking grass.
And there's a new but not-so-fresh head decorating a fence post.
That grass is a type of horsetail. I have two native down by the pond bank. One of the oldest plants on earth. Those darkled areas are the actual leaves.
Equisetum (
horsetail,
snake grass,
puzzlegrass) is the only living genus in Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds.
Equisetum is a "living fossil", the only living genus of the entire subclass Equisetidae, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understorey of late Paleozoic forests. Some equisetids were large trees reaching to 30 m (98 ft) tall. The genus
Calamites of the family Calamitaceae, for example, is abundant in coal deposits from the Carboniferous period. The pattern of spacing of nodes in horsetails, wherein those toward the apex of the shoot are increasingly close together, is said to have inspired John Napier to invent logarithms. Modern horsetails first appeared during the Jurassic period.
A superficially similar but entirely unrelated flowering plant genus, mare's tail (
Hippuris), is occasionally referred to as "horsetail", and adding to confusion, the name "mare's tail" is sometimes applied to
Equisetum.
Despite centuries of use in traditional medicine, there is no evidence that
Equisetum has any medicinal properties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equisetum