Musings

You are looking at the trunks of white birch trees, surrounded by the green of lilac bushes. It’s quite a large patch of lilacs, but the ones only a few meters north of these have dried leaves…so they leafed out this year, and then suffered trauma, probably lack of water. I’ve never seen the lilacs shrivel like that. Anyway, here are the pretty, surviving, flourishing lilacs.

Posted at 9:10 PM | Comments Off on Location location location

Watch out for the epenthetic schwa. Then (hopefully) you can sort your plurals and possessives.

Details in Remy Tumin’s article in the NYTimes. It may be called “Is It Harris’ or Harris’s? Add a Walz, and It’s Even Trickier.”

Posted at 8:42 PM | Comments Off on Apostrophe complexity

I like mint, spearmint much better than peppermint, and this is spearmint. It’s easy to grow and I have flourishing plants here and in the UP, yet I manage to forget to pick it and use it…in salads and beverages and more….

Posted at 9:24 PM | Comments Off on Pick me up

I reached back to this day in 2021 for a photo. Sometimes the past is great fun to visit, and a distraction from the present.

Posted at 9:47 PM | Comments Off on Timing

Native to Mexico and southward. I knew dahlias are New World, but not marigolds.

Posted at 9:27 PM | Comments Off on Incremental botanical knowledge

The other day I came across a discussion of perhaps the most common protein on earth, rubisco, technically styled RuBisCO. Its long version is Ribulose-1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase. I have no recollection of encountering mention of RuBisCO before.

RuBisCO is an enzyme, and it is critical for plants in extracting CO2 from air as part of the photosynthetic process. One key aspect of RuBisCO is that is extremely slow-acting, for an enzyme.

The utility of RuBisCO for human dietary needs is still under development, although I don’t know what the holdup has been…maybe it’s all chemistry? 🤣 Anyway, it has to be extracted from plant matter, then purified, etc., all without altering its protein properties.

My perspective is merely from trying to manage the onslaught of vegetative summer growth, without consideration of its potential RuBisCO content. Think: mowing, walking, cutting, and the like…. How would these chores be different if I could dump the plant-matter into an extractor…and, pfft, there’s dinner.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Lost in the weeds?

I didn’t see much in the way of wildlife today. I did see two garter snakes. Also, multiple flickers. And the usual deer, plus geese on the lake. I heard night-time loon calls and multiple sandhill cranes above.

Posted at 9:18 PM | Comments Off on Critter rundown

Despite there being plenty of sunshine today, I continued the laziness of yesterday…reading a John Grisham novel (library book) set on the GA–FLA line, on islands on the coast. Ho-hum.

Posted at 10:11 PM | Comments Off on Out of body experience?

I’ve always heard this called sweet pea. For sixty-ump years.

Then, a few minutes ago, I did an online search, and oops. Nope. Sweet pea is botanically Lathyrus odoratus, which is a tip-off that it’s a scented flower. These specimens are not scented. That means they are Lathyrus latifolius, or everlasting pea (and other common names). The two are close cousins looking very, very similar, and I’m sure there are also morphological differences.

I’ll keep calling these flowers sweet peas, because tradition is tradition; however, I’ll try to remember if someone knowledgeable about such things is around that it’s really L. latifolius.

Posted at 9:10 PM | Comments Off on Live and learn

Meet Acer palmatum. This maple is native to east Asia, from Korea north into Russia. Knock me over with a feather; I just read that there are over a thousand cultivars of this species.

Posted at 10:16 PM | Comments Off on Go horticulturalists