When I left the house for work yesterday morning, I saw what looked like tissues on the ground in the woods behind our house. They were something I’ve never witnessed before — “frost flowers”. They only form from a relatively few kinds of weeds in the fall or early winter when there is enough moisture in the soil (we just had two inches of rain) and it gets cold quickly (the temperature dipped to 21 deg. F overnight). Water “wicks up” through the stem (which appears to split) and turns to ice, which slowly grows into delicate ribbons.

It this case it looks like they formed on the “frost weed” (White Crownbeard), and there were about a dozen of them of different shapes, generally several inches across.

I set up my camera and tripod at 8:30 a.m. and collected 6.5 hours of photos which I made into this time lapse video, which is 900 times faster than real time. The ice flower can be seen to still be slowly growing, until it warmed enough for the flower to fall apart. I cut the video off before I noticed new ice starting to grow out the stem again.

Click on the full-screen icon for the best viewing…the video is high-definition.