Reversion - varigation gone

Look at this weirdo shrub.  This happens sometimes.  A perfectly nice green columnar top shooting up from a yellow, spreading, variegated base.  Strange stuff like variegations and weeping forms are found from time to time growing on regular plants and these 'sports', mutant shoots, are kept by grafting them to regular root bases.  But every now and then portions of these 'sports' revert to the more normal type.  TPP has a variegated agave, and after it flowered, the main shoot began to die and in the process it produced side shoots that continue the growth of the plant.  But in this case half the side shoots were totally green probably because the population of cells in a particular meristem did not have chlorophyll free cells that make the variegation.  If they contain cells of both normal and cholorphyll free types, the shoots are called chimeras, part one thing, part another (see link below).  If TPP has left them alone, his agave would have been a regular green plant for the future.  Here, the reversion produced a green shoot without the yellowish pigmentation, or rather with it, but the yellow being masked by regular chloroplasts.  A quick nip with the clippers would have left this a spreading yellowish evergreen (yellow?) shrub.  But no one noticed, or they did but didn't clip the green shoot, now the more vigorous green shoot with the regular columnar growth pattern has taken over.  Sometimes people inadvertently prune away variegated portions of their ornamental plants, and they wonder what happened.  If the shoot becomes completely white, devoid of pigmentation, it will grow only as a "parasite" on the rest of the plant. These are best known for redwoods.

2015 - Another fine year shot to heck! Year end musings

What's a tree worth? This interesting thought came to me while watching the chainsaw pros quickly clean up the ice storm tree debris.  As TPP watched a nearly 20 foot limber pine zip through the chipper, you know you only paid $130 for the tree plus the cost of delivery and planting (too big), but even if someone were to give you $200 for a replacement, you can't get back the 8-10 years of growth. That begins to tell you how much a really big tree is worth, they're really priceless and they should not be taken down without damned good cause.
So instead of a tree limb mess there now exists a 15 foot wide 20 foot long empty space although TPP's Sinocalycanthus appears to have escaped tree fall damage.  Good thin it'd be pretty tough to replace.  So the Phactors get to rethink this border garden and maybe try something different; it was a bit too shady for the limber pine. 
This ends TPPs first full year of retirement and the most surprising thing has been how busy his life has been. So no daytime TV, no shortage of chores, no shortage of gardening jobs, no boredom at all. On the positive side, he cooks more Italian food and shops more for groceries. Further he resolves to clean up all of the kitchen messes he creates. 
This blog is also almost 8 years old. Although very few people noticed at first, readership has been pretty steady for the last few years. Hope you all appreciate the total and complete absence of annoying popup ads or pathetic bloggers begging for donations. Heck, TPP hasn't even tried to flog his real life counterparts book; hard to do when writing under a pseudonym. The assumption is that readers appreciate these efforts.  Hard to know what my readers think because - in general silence. TPP admits that the primary purpose of this blog is to get things off my mind, to blow off steam, and lower the blood pressure in a semi-constructive manner.
Politics is so very bad this year that TPP can hardly write anything at all because it all comes out sounding so very pessimistic that it doesn't help the old state of mind at all. Seriously thinking that candidates should be asked if they garden, and if not, then we should forget them completely. Hoe some weeds, mow some grass, grow some tomatoes and then we'll talk.  Maybe 2016 should be the year of Gardening for better government, then we sharpen our hoes and weed out all of the baddies.
Send your local politicians some seeds and see what they do with them. Maybe we can grow some better government, a real grassroots effort.  Tell the blogger what you thinks. Time to cleanup the kitchen.

Living on tree-lined streets makes you young, thin, and rich

Well, that's a pretty amazing correlation, or is it causation? Articles like this catch your attention especially when you live on tree-lined streets. There are lots of factors here where the Phactors are. Lots of trees usually means older neighborhoods, which means older homes, and lots of younger couples with kids prefer the putty-colored developments in the burbs what with the new schools and all. Young professionals have no time for trees, gardens, and old houses. Of course, the correlation silly because the Phactors are not young, thin, and rich, although we can afford to live in this neighborhood, but so can senior citizens, city cops, gay guys, recent empty nesters, and indeed, some young, thin couples with young kids, but still not rich. Many of us think we get a lot of value in this type of neighborhood. This satellite image shows the east half of our block; the Phactors reddish house & garage roofs show up at the lower left down around 7 o'clock barely visible through the trees. Notice how the houses at the top with smaller lots have way fewer trees, except for the remarkable fellow who clearer his lot of trees and shrubs (just above center right). If you bisect the hedge row of trees at the top, that's about where our rear property line is backing up to four of the properties there. Trees are supposed to help your state of mind, and no question about it, our trees and our gardens make us feel much better, much happier, much thinner? HT to the Treehugger for the original article; check out some of the links therein.   

Tuscan Cypress

So you want some Tuscan plants, well, this tree is about as Tuscan as a tree gets.  Cupressus sempervirens, called Tuscan cypress here in Italy, but the Mediterranean cypress throughout most of its eastern Mediterranean range.  Tall, dark-green, columnar, the trees are highly distinctive and a dramatic element of the local vegetation.  While native they are widely planted for hedge rows and along drives. Everyone wanted to know what they were right away.  Some in this areas are as big as TPP has ever seen them, and they seem to be loved by chick-a-dees. Here a row of Tuscan cypress form a wall behind a terraced olive orchard (gray green trees) with lots of rock walls.
 

Garden death list

This was the worst winter in 30 years and a lot of plants took a beating.  Here's the obits so far.  Two species of beauty berry (2 bushes of each), one well established, one new last year.  Status: to be replaced unless some sprouts appear from the base. A rough-barked Japanese maple - ouch!  This was no big-box store cheapie and it was doing very well.  Status: no breaking buds and no sprouts as yet. This one will be hard to replace without visiting crazy Japanese maple guy again.  Vitex (chaste tree) frozen back or frozen in toto?  This has frozen back before and then sprouted from the base almost growing like an herbaceous perennial, so we'll wait some more. New little plum yew died; it had not yet gotten well established and probably wasn't quite hardy either.  Status: already replaced by bigger and better shrub in its 1st appearance in local trade.  Heliantheum (Cistaceae) - no sign of life after surviving previous several winters.  Sad.  Status: will seek hardier replacement. They said zone 5, but not sure this means what its supposed to mean.  Leptodermis - Again, zone 5?  Who are they kidding?  Status: An underwhelming plant; replacement uncertain. An ornamental hemlock; it was ailing from the heat and drought, and the winter and rabbits did the rest.  Status: if replaced, it will be in a different location. TPP's hemlock batting average is terrible - zero for several plants. Established trees do OK here, but tough to establish in our hotish and dryish summers.  Bought and planted B&B Japanese snowbell in place of the hemlock, but it has failed to break bud - seems it didn't survive over-wintering at the nursery. Someone owes TPP a new tree, but another of the same? Status: rethinking the whole idea about what to put in the center of this bed.  It's been a tough spot for some reason. Corylopsis (winter hazel) - hasn't broken bud yet, but holding out hope still. Status: uncertain. If replaced it will be in another location. Several others were damaged, frozen back, but expect them to recover, eventually.  All the rosemary and lavender froze, but the sage is tough. Lost a really good dwarf Nova Spy apple tree.  Status: will replace.   New Pterostyrax  (epaulette tree) was a worry, but it was undamaged as were the pearl bushes (Exochorda) and one even flowered! OK, they're hardy.  Itea took a beating but is now showing signs of life - a close call. Tree peonies all survived with minimal damage - yea!  

Another treacherous rain event

Last night's rainfall "event" was another treacherous rain event.  It was almost a no-show, but things look wet this AM so it will give people the impression they don't need to water things.  It's been more than 3 weeks since there has been significant rainfall, and cracks are opening in the ground that my hand fits into.  A neighbor dug a 3' deep pit, and it was dusty at the bottom.  Plants are really beginning to suffer.  Perennials are going dormant and trees are dropping leaves, which they do this time of year, but for different reasons.  Yesterday TPP watered a number of youngish trees and today we'll continue watering.  TPP sees seriously stressed trees all over.  Yes, watering costs you money, but do does replacing trees.

A little drought relief

A band of mild-mannered thunderstorms rolled through the are about 3 am and we became aware of this when a nervous cat clambered onto the bed to tell us about it.  She doesn't like the noise and needs some reassurance.  Things were so very dry that watering required making tough decisions about what to water next, and it was not actually possible to keep up.  It had been so long since the last rain that a spider had built a web down inside the rain gauge, and this sort of webbed up the works, but the storms provided somewhere near 3/4s of an inch of rain giving us just a bit of breathing room.  Hardly know what to do today without watering.  If this type of late summer hot weather drought becomes a regular pattern then some plants may become untenable in this area, e.g., red maple is already iffy.  Plant more oaks people.  A long dry spell also gives you an opportunity to see a lot of poor watering, just wetting the surface and doing no real good at all.  Watering must be long and slow; it takes patience and depending upon the sprinkler and area, one to several hours.  A nozzle on a hose is for washing your car; it's not for watering plants.   

Tree pruning - man with a machete

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!

This week's lab - quad spring field trip

Today and yesterday have been the first two days this semester when you could actually conduct some out door instruction and not be cold or wet, or both.  One of the problems with lab instruction is that the bits and pieces, the specimens, the pickled items, the microscopic slides, don't get integrated into the minds of many students because they didn't take them apart to begin with.  This is why it's so useful to take people and show them where everything came from, i.e., that cones and flowers are actually attached to plants, in particular ways, in certain places, and that if you observe closely you can see some things you've never noticed before, like the North American corkwood (Leitneria floridana) in full glorious bloom!  OK, actually some pretty unremarkable catkins, but the plant is plenty unusual.  The only problem today is that the entire campus is outside too and inevitably somebody has made the mistake of choosing some space under the only "male" ginkgo on the campus, or the only doug-fir with nice cones, and so on.  TPP tried to include them, you know, make them feel like part of the group, show them what's going on, and some seem happy enough to play along, and others give you let's-leave-the-weirdos-alone stare.  You can even suggest they shift their lounging over to a flowering crab or some other inconsequential tree.  If they get a bit crabby TPP points out that this is his classroom, and they are welcome visitors, but he's got a class to teach.    

Dastardly tree attackers

What kind of person attacks trees?  Trees can't get away, so as a target they don't offer much sport.  And even very large trees are easy enough for a puny human to destroy using our tools, fire, saws, axes (TPP can't bring himself to watch Ax men on TV.), even if tree took decades or centuries to grow.  More likely certain trees represent something that certain people don't like.  Still what nasty, small, cowardly people these are, totally thoughtless, totally without regard for nature.  Sort of like people who throw bottles or stones through windows.  Or the kind of people who run over turtles with their cars.  Can you believe it? 

Trees changed almost everything

A recent publication in geology (this link takes you to the SciAmer news, not the publication directly) reports that rivers changed significantly because of the evolution of trees. Although rivers vary significantly, they were broad and shallow with wandering courses prior to the evolution of trees where upon these larger plants with deeper roots which could hold more soil began restricting rivers to narrower, and therefore deeper, channels. So it comes as no great surprise that many flood prone areas are often the result of deforestation. Rivers are certainly not the Phactor's cup of tea, but trees are. It's hard to imagine Earth without its mantle of forests and soil, although it certainly isn't what it used to be. This story takes you back to the Devonian, a smallish geological period, just under 60 million years in duration beginning 416 million years ago. At the beginning of the Devonian one group of vascular plants existed and they ranged in size from about the length of your little finger to a full hand span, tip of the thumb to tip of the little finger, and they were the biggest plants on land! But by the end of the Devonian not only had plants diversified considerably, but the first aborescent plants appear, pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsids. About 10 million years later the first true trees (Archaeopteris) appeared right at the end of the Devonian. The former grew like tree ferns while the latter had a branching crown, and you need more an more anchoring to keep bigger plants standing upright. The next geological period, the Carboniferous, the dominate land plants were aborescent forms of clubmosses, horsetails, and ferns, and these, along with the early seed plants, pteridosperms, formed the forests that changed the form of rivers.

Why don't trees freeze?

The Phactor gets questions, and what could be more appropriate than asking why don't trees freeze and die on a morning where the temperature is -13C and my system is still trying to get from tropical to temperate, so arctic is still beyond me. In actual fact some trees do freeze, but they do not die. The biology of some woody plants, those whose ranges extend the farthest into the high latitudes, allows their cells' water to freeze without harming the cells. These are called "freezing tolerators" and once frozen they can withstand almost any temperature. One such shrub in the Phactor's collection is the Siberian cypress (Microbiota) and it is hardy to Zone 2, -45C. It doesn't have to worry about such severe cold here in Lincolnland, but it can suffer from the opposite, our summer heat.
Other trees don't freeze; they have the ability to deep super-cool the water in their cells and avoid freezing, although that gets more difficult as the temperatures get colder. The ability to deep super cool has its limits at right around -40 (F or C!), where the two temperature scales actually equal each other. This means that freeze avoiding species can disperse and grow further north but then when they finally encounter a really cold temperature, they will freeze and die. The first map shows the distribution of a freeze tolerating species, the red-osier dogwood, which ranges north right up to tundra. The second set of maps shows the distributions of 4 species of freezing avoiders (A-D, American beech, white ash, sugar maple, and northern red oak). The heavy line running just north of the Canadian border is either the border drawn by Google maps (not a funny joke in Costa Rica right now) or the -40 C minimum temperature isoterm, which by definition connects all the points where the minimum expected temperature is -40 C. Other freezing avoiders are less able to deal with colder temperatures. Here in Lincolnland the minimum expected temperature occurs about every 10-15 years (-29 C), so a less cold tolerant tree or shrub might dodge the bullet for quite awhile before the climatic extremes demonstrate that my sweet bay magnolia is growing too far to north. Obviously global warming will shift such climatic zones and the distributions of organisms along with it. 54 million years ago when the climate was much warmer tropical forests extended to 50 N latitude! Imagine southern magnolias growing in Green Bay, Wisconsin!

Tree clones: immortality and sex

The oldest organisms on Earth are clonal organisms. Plants seem to have the capacity for immortality because they have perpetually juvenile tissues (meristems) capable of continued growth, and further, certain plant cells can dedifferentiate, return to a juvenile state, for wound repair and growth. This capacity is widely used in the vegetative reproduction of economically important plants. But can a clone live forever? Probably not, but they can be very old. The Pando clone of quaking aspen in Utah is estimated to be at least 80,000 years old, and some estimates place its age as 10 times older, which would make this clone as old as our whole species! Not only is Pando impressively old, it’s big covering over 40 hectares and at over 6000 tons is the largest organism alive. Now of course one problem with being an immobile species is that the longer you live the more likely you’ll encounter some environmental disaster, a fire, a flood, a volcanic eruption, a storm, a chain saw. But clones have a sex problem. Since they are all one genetic individual although looking like a whole forest, they cannot produce seed except by exchanging pollen with another individual, and when one individual occupies the whole area that becomes less likely. Even worse recent research suggests that as the clone gets older, it loses sexual vitality because of an accumulation of mutations. These show up in pollen because pollen only has one copy of each gene so if a harmful mutation occurs it may affect the viability of the pollen, a harm that does not affect the tree because in its tissues chromosomes and genes occur in pairs. By the relatively young age of 20,000 fertility can be diminished by more than 3/4s. So the clone may live a long time, but as it ages, its ability to sire offspring and start a new individual drops, but who knows Pando may already have lots of offspring.

Flushed with success

Regular visits to our teaching greenhouse are part of my job and mental health program. Although the facility is not physically impressive, the number and variety of plants contained therein is quite impressive. Interesting observations of exotic plants happen regularly.

Over 20 years ago I brought a small tropical tree seedling back from Queensland Australia. It’s the genus Maniltoa in the legume (bean) family and it now has nearly outgrown the greenhouse. If it were not pushing up against the greenhouse glass this tree’s limbs and leaves would show a graceful arching. But this plant has a most unusual and ornamental feature. It produces huge buds from which emerge whole branches bearing nearly full-sized leaves, but here’s the strange part, these branches and their leaves are pink and totally limp. They dangle down like rags, and since the tree tends to flush, a number of such pink branches emerge from buds all at once. Such flushes of new vegetation are thought to overwhelm herbivores that might attack the new foliage.

Slowly, over a couple of weeks, the pink pigments fade and chlorophyll slowly develops turning the leaves pale green. And then, over another few weeks, the branches and leaves slowly pull themselves up into a rather graceful arch. They accomplish this by having a specialized swollen zone called a pulvinus at the base of leaflets, leaves, and branches. Looking and acting a bit like a knuckle, the pulvinus (see close up on right) reorients the branches and leaves. The same structures close up and droop many legume leaves at night and account for the movement of leaves on the touch sensitive Mimosa pucida, another legume.

So our Maniltoa has provided us with a bit of colorful tropical cheer on a cold, late winter day. Enjoy.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday! What a great idea!

Fraxinus is the Latin name for ash. This figure illustrates white ash (1), red ash (2), black ash (3) and european ash (4), Fraxinus americana, F. pennsylvanica, F. nigra, and F. excelsior, respectively.

Unfortunately here in Lincolnland these great shade, forest, and timber trees are being treatened by an introduced insect, the emerald ash borer. This Asian insect is spreading and millions of ash trees will die as a result.

The American elm and chestnut have already been largely wiped out by imported fungal diseases, so this would not be the first time an important and major tree has been been eliminated by an exotic pest.

Unfortunately there isn't much we can do to save the ash, even by having ash wednesdays. By the time a pest like the emerald ash borer is discovered the type of drastic action it would take to eliminate the infected trees and create a large enough ash-less zone to stop the insect is literally beyond our capabilities. Millions of trees would have to be cut and destroyed, and many would be on private property, so image the opposition, protests, and legal actions. Imagine the expense. Imagine Lincolnland without ash trees.

What will happen when we lose all the ash trees? It probably won't have much of an impact on the success of our professional baseball teams here in Lincolnland; I think they've already switched to rubber bats. And of course all the unprofessional teams use aluminium bats. And it's hard to know what other species will become losers too because ash trees are now missing. But some sort of domino effect will certainly take place whether we notice it or not.

So enjoy ash Wednesday while you can. Time to go and hug an ash tree.

I can't wait for fig Friday!

Oldest tree on Earth - period!

Just days after posting about the oldest living tree on Earth, while working on educating myself about fern phylogeny, up pops references to the oldest tree on Earth, an organism that produced the first forests.

For those of you who really want to know, the tree in question is a pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsid, a Devonian ancestor of ferns. This particular forest tree dates to 385 mya (million years ago), surpassing what was previously the oldest known tree, a progymnosperm called Archaeopteris, but a relative youngster appearing no more than 370 mya. Interestingly enough, both were discovered near Gilboa, New York in the Catskills. You may wonder how such big things as trees can escape the attention of geologists and paleobotanists, but it wasn't that these trees weren't known. They were, but the problem with fossils is that some assembly is required, if you know you have the right pieces to the puzzle.

The trunks of these forests were very well known. What wasn't know was what kind of tree they were. About 50 years ago a tree trunk with gymnospermous wood was found physically attached to a ferny foliage, the absolute evidence that these two fossils were in fact one and the same plant. And that is how progymnosperms, the ancestors of seed plants, were discovered.


Similarly the fossil trunks (Eospermatopteris) were matched up recently to smaller trunks bearing the fossil "foliage" called Wattieza. The entire tree is known by the latter name because was the first published (a principle of priority). The "foliage" is not composed of leaves, but of branches that were attached to the trunk in a helical whorl quite like the leaves of tree ferns, cycads, or palms. And now that it was known how big the trunk was, their height could be estimated, and these ancient trees grew to 8 meters. This is quite amazing because at the beginning of the Devonian (416 mya), land vegetation was no taller than knee high. And just 30 million years later, there were forests.

Forests really change things because trees are giant obstacles that alter their environment, the weather, the climate, the soil, and they make habitat for other organisms. So trees like this are responsible for transforming a barren terrestrial environment into a green Earth we would recognize. But it is hard at such a great distance to appreciate such organisms, and to that end I can think of no more fitting appreciation than a poem.

Ode to a pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsid

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsid . . . tree

A tree whose “whorled dichotomous ultimate units” . . . earn
An ancestry to the modern fern

A tree whose “photosynthetic/reproductive modules” . . . on high
Provide lowly detritivores with a food supply

A tree whose “digitally branched modules” . . . rain
Spores upon a Devonian plain.

A pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsid that in times, post Ice Age
Is resurrected by a geology hammer’s rage

Poems are made by fools like me
But only Darwin can theorize a pseudosporochnalean cladoxylopsid . . . tree

By Robert Titus, Kaatskill Life, Winter 2007-2008.

Oldest known tree

I was feeling a bit meloncholy this morning and I could not exactly figure out why. Was it the end of a sometimes frustrating, sometimes exhilarating year, or the realization that the celestial cambium has added another growth ring, and we along with it are another year older. Was it because Janice Joplin was singing Me and Bobby McGee on the radio? And then quite by chance while looking for one thing (the world's first forest) I found another.

A Norway spruce (growing in Sweden) has been identified as the oldest tree on Earth. Growing at a high latitude this is not the towering giant you might expect; it barely tops 13 feet tall. This part of the tree is not that old, and you can't find a set of growth rings you can count, but the woody root stock has been carbon dated to nearly 10,000 years old. That means this tree took root just about the time the Pleistocene glaciers were pulling back and uncovering this area.

10,000 years makes this tree the oldest living individual organism on Earth. A very impressive record, and somehow knowing this has cheered me up. Although this spruce grows in a tough area, it's primary problem is winter and winds. At this latitude and in such a sparse community, the most common environmental mishaps that threaten big, old trees (lightening, fire) are relatively rare. So by growing slow and low, it has survived millenia.

It's quite likely some clones have lived longer, much longer, but it is the clone that survives, not the individual organism. Because they reproduce asexually, while genetically the same, the members of a clone are not the origninal organism at all, but copies, so the genotype persists not the individuals. Some unicellular organisms may form clones millions of years old, but at what point have enough random changes been accumulated in different copy lineages of the originial genotype that we would judge them different organisms? I have no idea.

There are aspen and sagebrush clones that are estimated to be around 10,000 years old, but no part of the original organism persists, just the genotype. So for now a Swedish Norway spruce holds the longevity record.