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flora / hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Yeah, have some more flowers why don’t you?
29
Jul 19

Yeah, have some more flowers why don’t you?

Did you like the pretty and flowering things I shared last week? Well, good sir and madam, you are in luck. Because things are still flowering and blooming and looking nice this week as well. It’s a small window of time, it seems like, before we begin to lament the changing of all outdoors, so let us concentrate on it intently. Shall we?

I’d like you to meet my friend, Eryngium yuccifolium, but if Latin isn’t your bag, you can call it the far superior Rattlesnake Master.

It is a tall grass prairie land plant, and if it wasn’t in a landscaped box on the corner of a city street you might still see it around these parts. It is one of those prolific parts of the parsley family. Sometimes you can find it in places as far away from the prairie states as Florida and Delaware.

The common name, by the way, comes from the plant’s use in some Native American cultures. It has nothing to do with the balls of the fruit, which don’t rattle, or the way they can feel like you’ve been hit by a viper, but part of the plant was used in some instances as a snake venom counteragent. Also, this plant is great for restorations and sends out a 50,000 watt signal to insects. It is very popular with bees, beetles, butterflies and any wasp that can make it over for a visit.

Fibers from that plant were also used in making shoes. The Internet is just full of useful information, if you ask me.

You might also enjoy this Hibiscus grandiflorus, or swamp rose-mallow hibiscus. They sport five large petals, they’re all velvety soft, as you would expect from a hibiscus. The shrub itself can grow to about six-feet, but this particular guy is a long way from home. Usually you’ll see this in the Gulf Coast states and in more swampy, wetland areas. Why it’s growing in an alley here is a mystery.

There’s probably a holiday gift story behind it. A present sat on the back window of a car on the drive back up here. And then the thing died, and someone put it outside at work. The next time somebody noticed there was a new growth, and then the flower crept up, sickly and weak. Some good shade, some good rain and now it’s sitting right there on the corner of the property. An aunt’s neighbor shared a cutting and now it is in a tiny alley behind a side street of a small business and it’s just waiting for its next act.

Pixar would do movies about this sort of thing, you know, if plants had mobility. The animators could give them all the agency in the world, and the flowers would be great clues to their personality. You know this one would be the biggest diva in the second act of the movie. There wouldn’t be a spinoff character, but there would be a laugh, and some plastic toy version, modeled after the animation. So it wouldn’t be quite right, but it would be close enough. But since this flower didn’t get the really poignant stuff, like the rose, or the active shots, like the ivy or daises or the daffodil, it wouldn’t sell well. You’d see it in bargin bins at knock off stores within a season, and no one would buy the things. Just another bit of plastic to step on in the middle of the night and inspire a new hit from Kraftwerk. And then one day there would be a revival. These things which they couldn’t move for eight bucks, so they discounted to three on account of the lesser displays and the damaged packaging, would suddenly be pulling down $45 or 50 dollars, more in the original packaging. And a kid would scream. The kid would have to have it. They’d just diiiiie if they couldn’t get it and the Gen Z parent would think back on when they had almost the complete set of these guys and they’d roll their right into their kombucha when they got a Gryzzl alert about a live action movie remake. Hollywood has no new ideas anymore, they’ll say, and meanwhile the kid is hyperventilating because Jan has it and I neeeeeeeed it and Jan! Jan! Jan! And sure, that’s not even grammatical, but kids these days, am I right? And then you’d hit on the idea! It’s perfect! It’s cheaper! And it’s beautiful! “Let’s just go, honey, over to the greenhouse and get you a real hibiscus. Your grandma can show you how to re-pot it.” And that’s when you’ve lost your kids forever.

Stupid Pixar movies.

There are 1,500 species in this particular family — including okra, which we enjoyed as a part of our dinner last night — and some of these mallows range into Canada. Maybe this particular one just needed some space.

Tonight we enjoyed tostadas, so I fully expect to run across some tortilla plants or pepper, onion or bean bushes tomorrow.

flora / Friday / hobby / photo — Comments Off on Friday flora
26
Jul 19

Friday flora

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.

flora / hobby / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Things which grow
25
Jul 19

Things which grow

Please enjoy photos of these lovely growing things on campus and around town. This first one is growing not too far from my office. It is called the Casa Blanca Lilium, an oriental hybrid lily. The texture on the petals is a beautiful thing. They’re pretty easy to grow and lovely to look at, aren’t they?

How do you feel about the Acer palmatum? Commonly called the Japanese maple or, as I just learned the red emperor maple, they can be shrubs or small trees. I suppose that has to do with its care, being pruned or out in habitat. This one is found in a well-manicured flower garden at a downtown church:

Cultivated for forever in Japan, Korea and China, they started spreading around the world in the 19th century. There are three subspecies and dozens of cultivars. Maples on the seas.

Here’s the Phlox maculata:

It’s a perennial, indigenous to the eastern United States and now also growing in Canada. Or maybe you’re more interested in the bee. That, of course, is your common bumblebee, one of the 250-plus members of the Bombus genus, about four dozen or so are in the U.S. Don’t ask me which one this one is from, we aren’t that close.

He was a pretty fair model, though.

Those aren’t bad, I’d say, for cell phone photos.

hobby / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Here’s my plan
20
Mar 19

Here’s my plan

One day, when the world slows down and I don’t have things to do or places to be, I’m going to do a study of leaves.

I’m going to pick a branch and mark it, somehow.

And then I’m going to take a picture of it each day, from buds until leaf drop. I’m going to do a study of a leaf.

That’s my plan.

hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on I stayed indoors
26
Mar 18

I stayed indoors

It snowed this weekend …

And I found this Alec Wilkinson quote: “One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.”

Wilkinson was writing about S. A. Andrée, the visionary Swedish aeronaut who, in 1897, during the great age of Arctic endeavor, left to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon.

Andrée and the two other members of his expedition crashed and then lived on the ice for another three months, before they died in some way that’s still a mystery. It was 33 years before the bodies were found, so it’s not as bad as all of that here, I took that picture and went back inside, but still.

It kept snowing.

So I worked in the garage. And I turned my hand sander into a mounted tool. I just cut out a hole in a box and wedged the sander in there:

It worked really well. I could move a piece of wood around the belt rather than the sander over the wood. So I guess I’ll need to build a more permanent version of this one day.

It let me sand this piece into something approaching an even roundness:

I’m making a gift for someone. And I took a bit of scrap pine:

And cut, and sanded, it down to this:

Its a book holder out of a bit of scrap wood. It helps prevent hand strain and keeps the book from closing up on you. Works pretty well, but the thumb hole is too big. That’s why you make prototypes.

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