Here’s another one of those troubled members of the floral community, the ne’er do well that never does … well. The layabout. The deadbeat. The do-nothing. The idler, loafer, lounger. The hibiscus aridus:
Bees, butterflies and hummingbirds like ’em. And you can find them as far away as South Africa. Again, I found this one in the back parking lot of a little building almost half a world away from there. Needless to say, it has a wide range, which is impressive for such a malingerer, the shirker, slacker and slouch.
Or perhaps I’m being too harsh. Maybe that plant is doing what it is supposed to, being colorful and charming and contributing to the local ecology and all, but suppose it’s just hiding a bit of curbside garbage can holder?
Don’t you think it could be doing more than that?
I was given a candy bar today. It was pretty good:
The big celebration starts in a few more weeks. I’ve been wondering for almost three years how you celebrate something that’s 200 years old. What’s the appropriate sequence of events to mark such a big birthday of an important, and yet inanimate, institution? And all this time, the answer should have been obvious: milk chocolate.
You’d think a 200-year-old candy bar wouldn’t taste so fresh. Or maybe you’d be surprised that a 19th century chocolatier would be so prescient as to make such a treat. You wonder how far into the future his vision might have gone, and exactly where he warehoused those delicious things.
We enjoyed a little bike ride this evening:
We tried a new road, a partially tree-covered, split lane number. Nice houses, no traffic, a place to take a deep breath, or a hard pull. It was a good ride, not fast, but it felt strong, in my legs I mean. Didn’t even bother my foot, which has been a mild bother to me since April. But progress! Which makes sense, you know, at the end of July.
The solution, as ever, is to ride more.
flora / hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Yeah, have some more flowers why don’t you? 29 Jul 19
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.
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.
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.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Apollo 11 mission. And somewhere in the comments of this NASA stream of the capsule recovery someone writes “Is this happening now?” And that’s what you’re going up against in the world. Maybe Buzz Aldrin is right, about this too.
Anyway. I put this picture on Instagram over the weekend, while I was watching the CBS special marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
I took that photo Thanksgiving weekend in 2006 at the Space and Rocket Center. A whole bunch of family decided we’d all go look at all the sites in between turkey and barbecue and it was a great day. I’m not related to the people in that photograph, but I did listen in to the conversation enough to figure out what was going on.
There’s three generations of a family in that photograph. The younger man brought his son and father to see the museum to show his son what Grandpa did.
Grandpa worked on the Apollo missions, as an engineer. This was a trip down memory lane for him and he played the moment very cool. The grandson was too young to really appreciate this yet, but the father that middle generation man, was very proud of this moment.
The little boy, he probably just wants to go flip and toggle things in the museum’s displays. It might not have mattered to the old man, who, along with a lot of other people were taking part in A Great Thing.
It mattered, though, to his son, who carries this sense of pride about it.
Attitudes are curious. They can attach, morph and bind themselves to a single moment or ideal or action and carry us through a generation. That older gentleman had the war, and then space and the moon. His son has the memory of the moon, the echoes of the 1970s and the information age.
What’s that little boy going to have? Of course, he’s not so little anymore. That photo is almost 13 years old now. But this was the part of their conversation that I recorded at these displays.
“Ask Granddad about which one he worked on.”
“Which one did you work on?” the six-year-old asked.
“Apollo 17,” the grandfather replied, a little quiet and sheepish that others might hear.
What’s an Apollo 17 to a 21st century babe? Maybe dad, or grandpa, was teaching him how to throw a football. He surely was showing him his gramps was a big man. “Grandad helped send people to the moon … ”
Yes he did young man, yes he did. Your grandfather helped do that. Tell everyone you meet.
We watched an IMAX about the lunar landings and, afterward, my mother asked me if that was something that is impressive to my generation. She was in middle school when NASA first kicked moon dust around. She probably remembers what dress she had on the day those crackling little words made it back into the atmosphere.
The moon landings had come and gone before I was born, a historical inevitability. I have the sense of wonder of the achievement, but not the drama of the attempt. It has always been a magical thing to think Someone’s been there, but I’ve never had the notion that it couldn’t be done, only only the question of why we haven’t gone back. Budgets, interests, war, different rhetoric and other causes dragged us away, and but for robotic exploration the interim has been full of wasted moments in that respect. We had moonmen on MTV and conspiracy theorists.
To think it was only a few years before I was born that we reached up and grasped at something we’ve feared and marveled at for all of time … that carries a weight.
That we’re on Mars, that’s impressive. That we have tourists in space, that’s already become passe. That I shared a room for a brief moment with a man — and in a NASA facility the number might still be “several” — who helped put us there, that people a generation younger than I am will remember him, that’s special in a very important way.
Haha. I’d forgotten about this. That same day, at the Space and Rocket Center, someone suggested we ride something they now call the Moon Shot. Through the magic of science, you are flung 140-feet straight up in 2.5 seconds, achieving 4Gs on launch, and a few seconds of weightlessness in the descent. I started talking smack. My grandmother, who delighted in showing me up, agreed to a ride. Again, the conversation as I recorded it:
The Yankee: Arrrrrgh!
Mom: Arrrrrgh!
GrandBonnie: When does the ride start?
Seriously.
When we were doing this in 2006 NASA was still working on the hardware and software for the Mars Science Laboratory. Launched in 2011, of course, it landed on Mars in August of 2012. I have a dim recollection of watching live footage of the control room when it landed, and I wondered how that felt next to the moon.
Robots! On Mars! (And still operational, years after the initial goals!)
It is never happening now, as grandparents always know. The ride always started a long time ago.
