Consider, if you will, the humble saw grass.
This one is called purple saw grass, because not everything can have a creative name. But by way of an apology over nomenclature, it displays a fine versatility. If you look at it from the right angle you can imagine it as something much more exotic, and more importantly, you can imagine yourself as some place much more exotic:
Sawgrasses range over great temperate portions of the world, including most of the central and eastern parts of the U.S. People normally think of the river of grass, as you’d find in Florida’s Everglades. It’s a picturesque image. But there’s a lot to have issue with here, while you’re imagining. The taxonomy is in dispute. Some of these things aren’t even grass, but sedges, which are merely a grass-like plant.
Hey, when you’ve got those lovely culms to enjoy. On some species you’ll see them reach a height of eight feet, but this particular one won’t quite make it. Lovely enough to walk by, however:
They also make for a pretty fair photographic foreground:
But enough about sawgrass, how about something less interesting!? That’s why you’re here, surely. Right?
This is a clump of something called Euphorbia.
It’s a catchall word, covering a wide range of flowering plants (or spurge). Poinsettias would fall into this group, as would a lot of ornamentals. There are more than 2,000 different plants under that genus and is quite large, genetically speaking. And you can find some sort of variety almost everywhere in the world. Carl Linnaeus wrote about Euphorbia in his critically important “Species Plantarum” in the middle of the 18th century, and that’s probably why it’s such a generic thing today. “Linnaeus wanted it that way,” but no one thinks to ask if ol’ Carl was having a bad day.
Some things that look like cacti are Euphorbia. Some things that have flowers which actually aren’t flowers fall into this genera too. I think ol’ Carl was just trying to meet a deadline.
I asked that bee, but he didn’t know either. He just wanted to be left alone, to do his pollen thing. It was almost the weekend, after all.
And to you I say Happy Weekend. (It should be capitalized in every instance.) Have a nice one and come back to tell me about it on Monday.
