The Phytophactor

Eyewitness testimony - illusions of movement

2013-06-17T11:46:00.004-05:00

These are very interesting illusions. Most of them work on me especially the one shown here, as long as my eyes keep scanning. You can stop them by concentrating on one point. Some of them don't work or don't work as well on me. Pretty hard to trust your eyes when they fool you like this. Anyone out there red-green color blind? Do these illusions work on you? What ones did you like or dislike? Could you paint your car with one of these patterns? He was moving really fast, officer. Would that be dangerous? Wonder if natural selection has ever produced such a pattern in the biological world?

Ask the professor: What do you do with yourself over the summer?

2013-06-17T11:20:00.000-05:00

Yeah! That just makes my morning! What do us lazy professors do with our 3 month long summer vacation? Well, let TPP offer a couple of answers. First, we don't get paid. Maybe you think we aren't working, but not to worry because we're not getting paid either. That's an equation you can perhaps understand. Certainly TV right now doesn't have much to offer. Let's see both hockey and basketball are still playing and dominating the TV, and it's June, so how could anyone care? Of course the locally favorite baseball team had already sunk to the basement of the league so we can't even be amused by their usual summer collapse. So you know, you just sort of sit around doin' nuthin'. Summer is when field biologists get to actually visit the field. That's were this picture came from, and soon it will be time to revisit these plots, re-photograph them and collect some more data. Hmm, actually haven't collected any data yet; still analyzing the images from the last time collection period. Finished revising a journal manuscript because the author wanted us to cite a paper of his that is going to appear in the same volume so we had no way to knowing about it yet. Bloody thanks for that bother. Finished revising and re-formatting about 150 figures for a book manuscript, then checking all the chapters, figure captions, indexes, contents, keyword lists, and size/magnification spread sheets to make certain all the references to these figures were still all correct. Even just assembling the entire thing (you'd think this would all be digital wouldn't you?) in hard copy (2) for submission took three days because you notice that not all of those things above were quite correct, so you fix everything on the fly. A steady stream of recommendation requests, internship notifications, and other student-centered requests need to be done ASAP, and did TPP mention we don't get paid in the summer even though we continue to deliver the services students count on? In his ample spare time TPP tries to keep entropy at bay with respect to his old house and his gardens. Did a biological presentation, actually just a question and answer session, to explain to Unitarians how the biological world works (topics covered: biological magnification of heavy metal pollutants, phytoplankton productivity, bees and biodiversity, soy food products, antibiotics in food, coral reefs and global warming, nutrient cycling, and so on); received many thanks, many complements, no honorarium. But rather than rant at him, told my dentist I was so bored with nothing to do that I was thinking of taking up golf (his game).

Woody weeds - the bane of shade gardens

2013-06-16T17:24:00.000-05:00

The biggest problem with shade gardens are the tree seedlings, woody weeds. Red bud are the worst because their roots go so deep so soon. A six inch seedling can be impossible to pull by hand with roots somewhere down in the Carboniferous. Sugar maple seeds like only a truly mammoth tree can produce are a somewhat different type of problem; they're easy enough to pull but at a density of a couple of dozen per square foot it's a major chore. Same goes for have a couple of dozen red bud trees; pretty and pretty prolific. Hackberry and cherry are concentrated under roost trees where their bird dispersers leave the seeds. When very young hackberry are easy enough, but give them enough of a start and they have a deep root too. The weed wrench only helps when the seedlings are big enough and you don't want them to grow that long. Even the kitchen garden is not immune and the maple seedling weeds are so thick you have to look close to find smaller garden plants. And the squirrels just couldn't get much fatter, and no, more squirrels is not any sort of solution. Between us we've clear cut a forests of trees, just at a seedling stage. Whew!

How does your garden grow?

2013-06-15T08:17:00.003-05:00

The Phactors are busy assessing the condition of their garden prior to opening our garden grounds to a few hundred visitors. The drought of 2012, which continued right through the winter, did a lot of damage to a lot of plants. On the grand scale, on the sit back and just take in your surroundings scale, our garden looks just fine. It's big, spacious, park-like, lovely. It's in the fine detail where you notice the severe damage to the lawn, yes, even our diverse lawn ecosystem took a beating from a brutally dry summer and a too wet spring. If you examine gardens up close, the blank spaces here and there tell the story. All the watering last year was highly beneficial because watered areas had very little if any damage, and without the TLC things would have been worse. Local nurseries report there was a lot of damage to Japanese maples and other somewhat finicky plants, particularly new plantings of all types and they are being inundated by replacement demands based on their sales agreement, but they know, and TPP knows, that most of those plant deaths were avoidable with adequate watering. Just a pointer here; if you water with a nozzle on the end of the hose you almost certainly do not water things well. So nurseries are doing a brisk business in replacements for plants not under warranty. One of the problems of liking less common plants is that they are not easy to replace. If your plum yew dies, no body here abouts is going to sell you a replacement. Say what? A plum, yew want a plum? Thank you anyways. Another interesting phenomenon that someone may wish to comment on is chlorosis, the yellowing of leaves where the veins tend to remain green, a sign of nitrogen deficiency. For some reason a broad cross section of plants, some of which never looked chlorotic before, are showing need of some nutrients. Rhododendrons and their heathy relatives always look that way, but the magnolias, crabapples, silver bells, and others are showing the symptoms. Somehow this must be related to the 2012 drought for this to be so widespread. Everybody got a dose of foliar fertilizer but it will take some time for the symptoms to subside. Some long planned hardscaping is under way: a new flag stone path through the back garden looks very nice and will make planning the rest of the area easier (knowing where people will walk always helps). However the new patio area by the garage and garden shed is just way too pretty for messing up with lawnmowers and wheelbarrows and the like, but that's its destiny. Someone asked if we had furniture for the area! Sure. Furniture. Prediction: the newness is going to be worn off pretty fast.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Ragwort

2013-06-14T09:37:00.000-05:00

Ragwort - not a very impressive name, and not at all certain why it's called ragwort; maybe the sort of torn/worn margins of the upper leaves. Senecio has 1000-1500 species ranging from herbs like this to vines, shrubs, and even trees. The ragwort shown is Senecio plattensis and the reason the Phactors have this species in their gardens is that it grew in a sand prairie-oak savanna that surrounded our Mississippi River cabin. When we sold the place a piece of the ragwort was among a few plant souvenirs. This ragwort grows near the outer edge of the shady area under the crown of a huge burr oak, on the south side, so it's a area of dry light shade, a tough place for any plant. But the ragwort does pretty well there even though our soil is far, far from sandy. It does spread, but not rapidly, maybe due to the much heavier soil, it's very hardy, and it's a quite cheerful late spring, early summer flowerer. Lastly, it's a native plant. What's not to like?

Congratulations! A winner for the FFF plant ID Quiz!

2013-06-13T09:16:00.000-05:00

Marek Michalski said...

I've found this !!! I've found this !!!
It's Alangium platanifolium, isn't it ? Very strange flowers and leaves...

Yes, correct, and TPP knows how Marek feels. My first guess was something in the Styraceae (see here for Styrax americana): yellow exerted stamens, reflexed white corolla, pendent flowers - dead wrong leaves, but that was my best guess. If you use Chinese traditional herbal medicines, Alangium is commonly used for something under its Chinese name. While it has long been placed in its own family, molecular studies now place this genus closer to the dogwoods which is not a relationship that just jumps out at you. But don't feel bad, this was a real tough one. Too bad my students didn't get to see TPP floundering. They can be tough on me. On our last field trip to a botanical garden, one of them asked about a strange looking tree while we were still several meters away, and TPP suggested it looked like a Cyndonia. One of them checked the label and crowed, "He's wrong; it's Pseudocyndonia"!

Ants in your pants

2013-06-12T11:02:00.000-05:00

Gardening and field biology have some common ground; both make you get outside and interact with nature. So TPP was replacing a rather sad juniper with a more shade tolerant shrub, and like most of our gardening, one thing has to be removed to make room for planting. Now this was not a large or well-off juniper so you don't expect much resistance, but from the very first shovel thrust a great protest erupts. This particular colony of ants was quite irate about the removal of their shrub or at the very least the overall disturbance generated in the process. What fun when they rush right up the shovel handle. Fortunately while this ant swarms aggressively, it doesn't sting very much, and in case you didn't know, one of the worst insect stings in the world belongs to the bullet ant of Central America. Phase one complete, TPP went to harvest some compost for phase 2 the planting of a new shrub. Digging into the bottom of one of our composers and filling a bucket with nice rich organic material, TPP began to notice a series of stinging sensations. It was an extremely irate colony of ants registering their annoyance with my disturbance of their nest in the compost bin. This was a much smaller species of ant but with a rather nasty little sting, and worse they were everywhere, yes everywhere! As a tropical biologist TPP has dealt with ants, red ones, black ones, green ones, army ones, all kinds and in all sizes, so even little bitty ones can get your attention when they attack in large numbers. To add to the fun, several hundred were transported to the planting site so that they could continue to harass the gardener. Fortunately our climate is too cold for any really nasty ants, but these were quite annoying, and you know, there are times when you just don't want that much interaction with nature. Anyone want to trade an anteater for some bunnies?

FFF plant ID quiz has readers stumped!

2013-06-11T16:10:00.002-05:00

Well, it has been a long time since the plant hotshots who read this blog didn't score the right answer on a plant ID quiz in about 10 nanoseconds, but apparently this one has you stumped. It's not even remotely related to nightshades or cucurbits, the two maybe guesses so far. Here's a taxonomic clue - it's closest relatives may be the dogwoods, but it's often classified in its own family.

Death by crazy and willful ignorance

2013-06-09T16:55:00.000-05:00

There's crazy, and then there's stupid crazy, and the latter can result in your death. Now you can be crazy and put a gun to your head, or you can be like this lady and kill yourself ever so slowly. A crazy lady named Navenna Shine, or Moonbean Butterfly, or Feelgood Featherweight, or something similar has this idea that she can live on just water, light, and air. Wow! Nuclear grade stupidity on display right there! Guess what city she's from? If you don't get Seattle in three guesses then you don't know much about where goofy new age thinking is concentrated. Read a basic biology book, lady, concentrate on the differences between autotrophs and heterotrophs, producers and consumers. Lady, autotrophy requires some metabolic machinery you ain't got, not to mention the pigmentation. So here's the results of your "experiment" accurately predicted: you'll starve to death; you aren't living on air, water, and light, you're just dying very slowly. With enough will power and stubbornness you will die, and probably get a listing in the Darwin awards except you look to be beyond your reproductive prime so you may have passed the genes for your particular intellectual gifts on to offspring already. OK this "news" was in the HuffPo, but the news article fails to deliver this message as if there were some small chance she might just pull it off. In all probabilty the communications major that wrote the article didn't understand that part of Bio 101. Why is this much crazy stupidity news at all? Is it mildly amusing that this lady has decided to ignore everything known about biology and thus endangers herself? Sometime a very long time ago, a cyanobacterium destined to become food for what was probably a amoeboid organism survived, entered into a symbiotic relationship with its consumer converting a heterotroph into an autotroph. Humans last had a common ancestry with this lineage a couple to 3 billion years ago. Here's the only truth there is. Us heterotrophs need premade organic molecules for raw materials and energy, and their only source is from other organisms. Get real, lady, or get help. You crazy!

Planting, re-planting, re-re-planting

2013-06-09T13:51:00.004-05:00

Dear garden denizens, please allow me to explain. For gardeners and farmers, planting is a hopeful, optimistic activity. The outcome of those small beginnings captures our imagination so the effort seems well justified. It would seem this effort is anticipated by yourselves as well. But this has been one of those years, when because of the weather, seeds and plants have not jumped off to a great start, instead little plants have stayed just the right snack size to be you meals. Now that brings us to May, and the necessity of re-planting. Re-planting is not optimistic, it's pragmatic. Re-plant or you get nothing. Re-plant because a short season is better than no season. So we do it with a certain fatalistic resignation that there just isn't anything else to do. This brings us to June and the realization that some things are going to need re-re-planting because our wildlife friendly yard is just too damned friendly. TPP's attitude about re-re-planting is pretty ugly; it generates a deep deep resentment where you think about declaring war on your friendly wildlife. One woodchuck has been relocated. Four possums caught up in the sweep by accident were encouraged to move along anyways. Four possums at once, a one trap record that some claim should be nullified because it wasn't that you caught 4, but that you caught a mother with 3 pups aboard. Whatever. It's still a record. Another woodchuck is being far more difficult, a wary, careful, well-fed beast with the audacity to dig beneath the garden shed! Please understand this is a woodchuck relocation program, not a death sentence. So dear bunny, the one that ate that row of impatiens this morning for their breakfast, things may get considerably less friendly. The next pepper plant to disappear will not be taken with a resigned shrug. Just remember, re-re-planting generates an ugly mood, and we're only human. Yours, TPP.

Friday Fabulous Flower - What is it?

2013-06-07T18:27:00.000-05:00

Oh, it's been awhile since TPP has had a plant ID quiz. Now to be fair, much to the delight of our woody hort person,TPP himself failed this quiz being not only unable to guess the name of this plant, but being unable to put it into a family! Of course, this was a plant he had never ever seen before, and there's always something new to see. So it's a small tree or big shrub, and here's the flower and the leaf. See what you can do with it, and then an answer will be posted if one of you hot-shots doesn't have it by then. It's not a gaudy flower, but it's rather cute dangling like it does. How about them anthers? This might be cute in a shady sort of back border, and it's clearly hardy here in the upper midwest.

Durian - Love it or leave it?

2013-06-07T13:10:00.001-05:00

Experienced travelers in SE Asia would know what this sign means. No Durian! It would be displayed right outside your hotel along with similar no smoking, no pets, no solicitations, etc. The only thing remotely close to this was seen in a classy motel in far upstate New York that had a sign in the bathroom that said: No Fish Cleaning In The Bathtub. This is the only fruit TPP has known to ever be banned from buildings. It's true, when ripe this hard, spiny rugby-sized fruit can smell something like an open sewer. It isn't pleasant. Yet in Thailand this fruit is a much beloved and favorite food that fetches a considerable price when of high quality. Westerners usually have a very negative reaction like the weird food guy (Andrew Zimmeren) gagging on durian. We laughed because it takes a lot to make that guy gag, but his reaction seemed extreme based on our experiences. What you actually eat is a creamy colored, custardy textured aril that surrounds the seeds inside this very protective fruit. The first record by a westerner of durian comes from no less than Darwin's younger counterpart, Alfred Russel Wallace, "To eat durian is a new sensation worth a voyage to the East to experience." Now to be fair, he didn't say he liked it, although he did say it was worth the trip in a day and age when it took months, and it would be a new sensation. Far from the love it or leave it extremes, there is a broad middle ground where TPP resides. Both Phactors have had durian on more than one occasion, and our reaction is similar, it's nothing vile, nothing special; we ate enough to be polite. Thai acquaintences snarfed up the rest. It's rich, sort of creamy or soft cheesy in texture and taste, but rather bland, no tartness or normal friutiness at all. We can't figure out the big deal Thai make of it, nor can we understand the negative reaction of so many people. Durian ice cream is OK, the sweetening helps. Only once in the continental USA have we found durian (frozen) for sale (Jungle Jim's, Cincinnati, Ohio); who knows how that is, but it was too expensive for a trial. So for what it's worth, durian has been ticked off our bucket list. If you've given it a try, tell us what you think. Report on any other exotic plant foods too.

Exotic plant food bucket list

2013-06-06T10:22:00.002-05:00

The Telegraph has a list of 100 exotic plant foods to try before you die (which hopefully is listed in order of reverse toxicity!). Of course they got help from an economic botanist at Kew Gardens. TPP had a look down the list and could tick off 39 personally tried, although some, like rambutan or durian, hardly seem exotic, or else someone has become just a bit jaded, but these and others are as common as dirt in SE Asian. And of course TPP has items on his list that Kew doesn't list, but mostly they are edible wild plants like Diploglottis (soapberry family), which has a tart golden aril, and the Atherton almond (Athertonia, Protea family), which has an nice edible seed a bit like macadamia to which it is related. The latter is really exotic because it only grows on the Atherton tablelands in far northern Queensland. Have a look at the Telegraph list and see how you do.
If TPP were to pick one off the list for you to try, it would be mangosteen.

It doesn't look like much but inside the tennis ball sized fruit the almost foamy white tissue dissolves into an explosion of tasty tart juice. Part of the fun is when you are presented with a fruit and you don't know how to eat it, so you must explore a bit with your trusty Swiss army knife. TPP should mention that hotels do not appreciate botanical work in their lobbies. Scheesh! Some of the tropical fruits like black sapote make pretty good ice cream if you have enough imagination to try making it.
TPP mentions toxicity above because of an interaction with one of the fruits on this list: longan. There are three species: lychee, rambutan, and longan, and the first two are quite good especially when fresh. Longan is not as common and it was described as having a "hot" quality, which did not jive with the mildly grape-like flesh of the other two species. In a market in Thailand, TPP tried longan, and it was not spicy at all, although a bit stronger in after taste than its relatives. Nothing hot at all, puzzling, but not for long. About 20 minutes later, TPP felt flushed, had a bit of sweat on my brow, and had an increased heart rate! Oh, yes, hot as in the "this is toxic" sense. Longan are large grape-sized and TPP advises not eating many until you determine it doesn't affect you negatively.

Naturally my list is pretty long because as a tropical botanist who has knocked around quite a bit, my opportunities have been greater than most, but you have to be actively curious, like poking around markets, and be a bit adventure-some food-wise. And this leads to the next blog about durian.

Chili pepper eating contest - in India!

2013-06-05T12:59:00.003-05:00

Chili peppers, which have no relationship to black pepper (Piper nigrum), are of a neotropical origin, but like all domesticated plants as they move around with people they get changed because different genotypes end up in different places and people select for different traits. Many Indians do not know or believe that chili peppers are a relatively recent addition to their culture and cuisine. In fact India now has a legitimate claim for having one of the hottest of chili peppers, the ghost chili, and here's a story about it in a chili-eating contest in India. TPP likes spicy food, but these are chilis are just ridiculous! As an aside, at the other end of the spectrum, the fried (mild!) chili peppers at Gram and Dun, a gastropub in KC, are just grand!

Interesting flowering data

2013-06-04T08:12:00.000-05:00

Data from our garden flowering log shows some interesting patterns. Here's one. So far 2013 has been above average wet and below average in temperature, and in general flowering has lagged behind and seemed late, especially last month. However, the 200th different plant to flower event occurred this year on June 2nd. Looking back to 2010 and 2011, the same event occurred on June 1st and June 2nd. Everything sort of averaged out to provide a sort of benchmark of flowering consistency, and this includes various DNFs (did not flower), a few new additions, and some cancellations (deaths). No surprise deaths and new additions tend to balance our; when something dies you replace it either in kind or with some new magnolia. Not much of a choice really. However, you probably noticed that 2012 was not mentioned. Last year the 200th flowering event occurred on May 10th! That's three weeks earlier. Amazing. This means that just about two-thirds of our flowering events happen by Memorial Day. That's a shady perennial garden for you. So that garden tour scheduled for June 16th can expect shade and not much else. TPP will make them a list of what they've missed. So why schedule a garden tour for June? Well, those petunia and impatiens gardeners have to get their little annuals planted. What kind of garden is that? You can bet those gardens don't even have a magnolia.

No rain? Back to field work!

2013-06-03T12:52:00.000-05:00

What? No rain? Well, soggy or not, there's field work to be done. A hard thing to figure out is the life history of some plants. Out on the prairie one of our target species is a lousewort, a green parasite, and it's been tough trying to figure out how it grows and when it dies. So a couple of years back a whole batch (sciency term) of largish (more jargon) plants were marked and measured in various ways with the idea of coming back the next year to see how they had changed. How many seedlings were around? How many shoots with how many leaves did it have now? Did it produce any plantlets via short rhizomes? Then nature intervened and over the next winter, one with plenty of snow cover, the marked plants, clearly showing a superior delectability had been almost completely eaten by some small mammalian prairie resident. You understand that all that before data, and the time invested in getting it, was essentially useless without the after data. But you try again. This year, a small 10 cm x 10 cm plots with lousewort seedlings were marked. And the seedlings are being counted and individually identified photographically. You expect the seedling stage to have a high mortality, but is it higher when the seedling must find a host to survive? Well, you place your bets and then spend your time and money to find out. Here's one of the 100 square centimeter plots (3 orange nails, 1 grey nail for orientation at the corners). The lousewort is easy to identify from the time it's first pair of true leaves appear by the scalloped margins. So, what you think? How many seedling do we have here? How many will survive? And how long before they get big enough to reproduce?

KC BBQ

2013-06-01T13:23:00.000-05:00

When you think of Kansas City, you think of barbeque. On a previous visit TPP tried one of the classic and legendary BBQ places, and it had a lot of grotty old ambience, and OK BBQ, but it was just OK. Some exploration, and some TV promotion, got us to the WoodYard BBQ. The down home, out-of-town, almost back-woodsie atmosphere gives you the immediate impression of some place authentic, the real deal, and it was the real deal. The big old smoker spreads the smoky aroma around pretty well, so everyone you meet for hours afterwards will know you've been doing BBQ somewhere. The baby back ribs were simply succulent, perfect. The F1 is quite the affectionado of pulled pork, and she was most pleased by her sandwich. And it's only about 10 min drive from downtown KC. You meal will be put on your table within minutes of ordering.

GnOPe - Nattering nabobs of negativism

2013-05-31T22:58:00.003-05:00

When it became obvious that the minority party was simply going to be opposed to everything and anything proposed by the Obama administration as a matter of principle, TPP decided to start calling them the GnOPe, where the G is silent, NOPE being the operative word. As annoying and counter productive as this approach to governing is, it pales in comparison to the latest manufactured "scandals". No question there were mistakes made, people made some poor decisions, but scandals, surely you jest. In thinking about the GnOPe long-delayed, over-reaction to these events, it reminds you of a small dog worrying the pant cuff of the mailman, for no other reason than to keep Obama from doing anything, and an old phrase came to mind, "Nattering nabobs of negativism." Thank you, Spiro, such a great phrase, to describe your own party, which of course you would not recognize.

The mid-west is wet

2013-05-31T18:26:00.000-05:00

Drove across northern Missouri yesterday to get to KC. The overall impression is one of a giant mud puddle. All in all pretty wet places were getting inches of rainfall, and not all of it is coming down gently. In general this is quite a depressing and annoying weather pattern this year, and quite different from the weather of a year ago. Our field work is suffering, our gardens are suffering, and the grass is growing. Presently the prairie canopy is at about 1 meter, and we had to add our tall flags to plots so that they can be found fairly easily at least for another month or so. Does TPP have to mention that one of our treatments is nutrient augmentation? Oh, will this make things grow? Oh, yes! Our soil is on the heavy side and when it's wet it gets sticky, and you just shouldn't mess with it, but you still want to get some stuff planted. The windows of opportunity have been few and brief. It's been easier to keep up with mowing the lawn, and that's been hard enough. Farmers aren't just dealing with wet soil; they've got flooding. A lot of flood plain agricultural fields are way too wet for planting, or flooded, and if they have been planted, they will probably need to be replanted, but it's getting late in the season to plant maize. Because of the demand and the price, maize has been plenty popular, so lots of frugal farmers have bought their seed already to get a discount, so it won't be easy, or cost effective, to switch to soybeans. Planting early on flood plains is a bit risky, but the USA's crop insurance program basically assured farmers of getting 80% of their anticipated sale no matter what, so while everyone likes the idea of insurance to iron out the ups and downs, the current program seems to encourage risky agricultural behavior. These are the things you think about when driving across the great midwestern farm belt. Also observed some very poor conservation where rather steep fields were plowed without any contouring or other erosion suppressing practices, and torrents of reddish-brown water were washing off of them. Some farmers need a dope slap; why they treat soil like everyone treats water, as if it were an inexaustable resource. In one area the wind preceding a storm was kicking up clouds of dust, top soil, and even in flat places like these fine soil erodes at a rate of 5 tons per acre, yet many people fail to believe this is happening. And then another line of storms moves in, and you begin to listen to the radio in case of tornado warmings. About the time you think perhaps things aren't being so violent, you pass a wooded area by a river where the tops of all the trees have been snapped off, recently. So it was a bit of a surprise when the sky turned a funny color this afternoon, blue. Delightful, as the heat and humity soared. Welcome to the great midwest!

Friday Fabulous Flower - another yellow peony

2013-05-31T07:50:00.000-05:00

Well, it was just two weeks ago that the FFF blog was a yellow tree peony, but here's another one. In this instance flowering about two weeks later is a Itoh hybrid, a cross between a tree peony and a herbaceous peony, so it's not a shrub but has a fairly robust form, sturdier than the standard herbaceous peony, and yellow flowers! This one was planted three years ago and this year is a three foot diameter mound. It flowers at the same time as herbaceous peonies, but unlike herbaceous peonies that tend to have flop-pot flowers, flowers literally too big for their stems. But the Itoh holds its flowers up quite nicely, and you would almost think this is a tree peony except it dies back over the winter although it may be a little woody at the base. What's not to like? Sorry TPP was less than enthusiastic about the flowers, they were smaller last year and fewer.

Soggy Memorial Weekend

2013-05-27T20:55:00.001-05:00

Oh, the gardening plans we had! Very ambitious, indeed, but over 3 inches of rain will sort of dampen your enthusiasm for gardening. Things are so wet that water is standing in all the low areas and not only did very little gardening get done, but it will be days before things are dry enough to plant some things. Well, this puts the Phactors way behind schedule, and as if that weren't bad enough, a couple of editors are telling TPP that he's behind schedule too. Quite a number of weeds met their demise due to Mrs. Phactor's diligence. Clearly she's a mudder. And the weather has been cool too; in the 30s just 4 nights ago. It's keeping some cool loving plants in flower longer, but pushing back the flowering time for others. A couple of large Deutzia have been in a flowering holding pattern for several days as well as a Kousa dogwood. Ah well, it's a very different year from last year which was so warm, so early, and this year is late.

Artist on a roll does gather moss

2013-05-26T10:03:00.000-05:00

TPP has a great fondness for botanical art in one form or another. So it was with great interest that he read about the sculptural art of Mineo Mizuno that uses moss to create a living component. These are very appealing, but immediately there was a strong feeling of deja vu all over again. A few years ago at the Chelsea Garden show one of the small garden displays was all moss: a moss covered table and chair under a moss-covered roof, and so on. One of TPP's great friends, the Mighty Michael, as he is know to a few of us, is more than a little creative, was even closer to the mark with a bit of creative play with his research organism, in this case genetic variants of a moss arranged in a worldly manner. This particular "image" graced the November 1999 cover of the American Journal of Botany (you can see more cover images here). It's pretty clear which image is from the artist and which from the botanist (artists don't use petri plates to display their medium). So take a little time to appreciate those little green things in life, moss.

Fracking threatens - wait for it - quality beer!

2013-05-26T09:26:00.001-05:00

OK, the possibility of polluting the environment doesn't seem to arouse public officials into action to strictly regulate fracking, but German beer makers, serious beer makers and consumers, worry about what fracking will do to the main ingredient of beer, water. German beer is brewed according to the oldest food purity law, the "Beer Purity Law" (Reinheitsgebot) of 1516, and according to this law, high quality water sources are to be protected. Allowing fracking has the potential to violate this law. Now it would seem that in terms of what matters in life, beer should always be a higher priority than energy production because if you've been drinking you shouldn't be driving anyways. Unfortunately here in Lincolnland, TPP guesses that most of our state legislators think Bud Lite is pretty good beer. Sigh. In a way it makes sense, light beer will ruin the environment! Will the quality beer brewers here in Lincolnland get going on the anti-fracking program? Bring this up when in your local brew-pub.

Tree pruning - man with a machete

2013-05-25T13:44:00.000-05:00

Pruning trees correctly is a skill; pruning trees well is an art. When you see a person, OK, in this case it will always be a man, heading toward a tree with the intent of pruning it and he's carrying a machete, nothing good will come of this. No connection exists between pruning and a machete. Most certainly the tree will suffer and more than likely the machete wielder will injure themselves in the bargain, and yes, TPP hears some of you out there saying, he got what he deserved. Anybody who desides to use a machete to prune a tree knows so little about pruning, or the use of a machete, that they should not be allowed near either one. To someone who knows pruning, you can see the results of bad pruning decades afterwards, tsk, tsk. Now of course taking a machete away from someone may not be easy. But maybe they can be distracted by that shiny new saw!

Styrofungus, mycolastic - saving us from styrofoam

2013-05-25T13:04:00.000-05:00

To interplanetary archeologists our particular civilization will probably be know as the "styrofoam makers". Styrofoam and its cousin polystrene (those white coffee cups, packing "peanuts", and fast-food clam-shell containers) are for all their convenience almost forever because nothing out there has the enzymes needed to decompose this stuff, so it tends to last, and accumulate. Worse, when it does eventually breakdown, polystrene breaks down into its monomers, styrene, a know carcinogen. On one hand you have to admire our bravery in drinking and eating out of these containers, but ignorance is bliss, so pass the asbestos platter and let's eat! These foamy plasticy things are great because of their strength and very light weight, so each and every one of us has unpacked something we bought that had those foamy form-fitting inserts to hold the object in place in the center of a carton. While excellent for this particular use, this is stuff has to be on the top 10 list of least green products. Wouldn't it be nice if someone found a substitute product? Well, a couple of guys out of RPI (Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute) are growing a fungal based alternative. The basic recipe is plant waste material (think shredded corn stalks) and a fungal mycelium, a bit of the filamentous body of a fungus that you typically don't see because it's growing under ground or in dead wood. Add water put into a form and the mycelium grows until it fills the space. Dry it out and voila, you've got a tough, light packing material custom-made to pack that Italian espresso maker you've ordered online. The best thing is that this biomaterial will break down quickly. The product is being made by Ecovative Design, sort of a nifty name. TPP learned of this via an article in the New Yorker published about 2 weeks ago. Wonder if it would make a good soil additive because if so we could begin to solve the peat moss problem at the same time. Remember this slogan, "Better living through fungus."