Friday Fabulous Foliage

Fairly new Japanese maple is becoming quite large, making itself a real presence in our front garden. The brand new foliage is quite striking and the pattern produced by the emerging leaves and elongating twigs is very handsome.  This one is the largest in our gardens, even on the day it was planted.  It was money well spent.  Bought a small "full moon" maple when it was pretty small, a hard to find variety, and it's taken several years to get to be noticable.  Mrs. Phactor says TPP is getting too old to buy small trees anymore. With trees size/cost correlation is positive and not necessarily linear. It also costs more because old gardeners have old backs, so you have to hire young backs to plant them (and then make sure they get them planted straight).  

Climate change - Something to beef about

Many people who deny climate change don't want to pay the cost of doing anything about it, but there will be other costs.  My colleague over at the Wild Plants Post explains the ecology of grasslands at elevated temperatures and the consequences for large grazers.  It's a pretty simple equation: heat causes grasslands to lose nitrogen, the food quality of the grassland vegetation drops, so grazers get less nutrition and grow smaller.  This may not mean much to a natural ecosystem, but if the grazers happen to be beef cattle and they take longer to gain weight or just simply grow to a smaller size, well, now you got something to beef about.  The cost to the beef industry will be huge.