Californica 2023- August Aralia californica

For August I'm working on the Aralia californica also known as Elk's clover.

Elk's clover, which is not a clover (insert shrug emoji here), has large leaves and greenish white flowers. Okay but these flowers don't look like the prototypical flower with a single stem and petals centered around an ovary. Instead these flowers are compound racemes of umbels around a foot across. Now each flower is tiny- only 2 to 3 mm in diameter. When I was little, my mom made these Christmas balls which were little styrofoam balls covered in sequins and bugle beads spiking out of the balls with these little seed beads at the end, and these flowers remind me of them. They don't sound pretty when I describe them but they were! And unlike most of the Christmas ornaments I saw. Anyway, the flowers become dark purple fruit, which I think you can see in the flowers. Some of them seem to have a lot of pale purple in them.

Full disclosure: I'm really not sure I'm name the flower parts correctly and couldn't find labeled pictures that named all the parts that what I wanted to know. Apologies for all my mistakes! So this is what I understand the flower to be: the umbels are the whole cluster- like an umbrella has spokes, so to describe how to do those spokes, I'm calling that the umbels even though I think that's not the most accurate way. Then the actual flowers which look like a petal-less ovaries, I'm calling the racemes. Then there are the little spikey bits that come off the flowers that I'm calling stamens. Again, I'm using these names because I think that's right but as I've exactly zero training in botany, gardening, horticulture, agriculture, or any other relevant science, folk or otherwise, I am most likely naming things incorrectly.

Here's the plan:

Colors: DMC 13, 211, 230, 310, 319, 3756, 3813

Leaves (A): Fishbone- 2 strands of 230 for some leaves and 2 strands of 319 for others

Stems (B): Stem Stitch- 3 strands of 3813

Umbels (C): stem stitch- 2 strands of 211 for some and 2 strands of 3813 for others (These are the dots on the pattern.)

Racemes (C): Satin stitch- 2 strands of 13 for some and 2 strands of 3756 for others (These are also the dots on the pattern.)

Name: Backstitch- 2 strands of 310

Box: Split stitch- 2 strands of 310, but maybe you want to save this for after you've completed more months to get a nice even stitch across months...