Prunophobia? Don't stand too close!

The single most common gardening mistake TPP observes is poor pruning, including none pruning.  Knowing how plants grow is essential, but you can learn most of what you need to know by careful observation.  Knowing what you want to accomplish is also essential.  Knowing that poodling (and here) is a total no-no is totally essential.  So what can possibly go wrong? No wonder many people fear pruning to the point that they make an even greater mistake - they don't prune at all.  Now you put pruning shears into TPP's hands and that mild-mannered, easy-going botanist turns into a clipping demon!  Don't stand too close, and please, never, ever point!  Snip!  Oops.  Sorry.  Of course some plants are a struggle.  Two dwarf apples of the same variety, and one is well-behaved and the other is growing all over the place.  They are clones aren't they?  And who would have ever thought that one of the most difficult pruning challenges is a thread-leafed (branched) Chamaecyparis?  Don't prune enough and it takes over; prune too much and it won't grow back.  Oh, and it grows fast too, so it's real battle.  Here's the things to look for with fruit trees: multiple leaders (leave only 1), downward growing branches, criss-crossing branches, weak branches, damaged or broken branches, suckers (a problem with grafted stock), vigorous new growth (reduce by 1/2 to 1/3).  If more than 2/3s of a branch needs to be removed, remove the whole thing.  Cut branches perpendicularly and cleanly.  Cut branches off flush to the stem; they heal faster.  Don't cheap out on your equipment. Don't ever go near a tree or shrub with a chain saw unless to intend to basal prune it. One real problem is that you need the right size clippers for the job, and they get bigger for bigger branches, but then they can be too big for some people's hands (this from Mrs. Phactor).  Good loppers are needed for big branches or major pruning, and they can provide a lot of mechanical advantage.  Keep them sharp.  If you find a rusty pair laying around somewhere, it may belong to yours truly.  A pair went missing somewhere out there a few years back.  TPP's earliest lesson on pruning came from a great gardener who told his young helper to prune out the oldest stems from some lilacs and beauty bushes.  When TPP asked how much to prune, his response was "there should be room for the birds to fly".  When the job was done, and being inspected, he let out a big sigh, "Ah, here I was thinking of sparrows, and you were thinking of eagles."  But, nonetheless, for the next few years they looked great. 

Spring garden assessment

This wasn't a particularly bad winter except the coldest weather was not accompanied by snow cover, so plants were quite exposed. Now that spring growth is beginning some assessment of winter damage can be made.  Two new mountain laurels took a beating; one might survive, the other is toast.  A Leptodermis also new last year looks like a loss as well. A big old Annabelle hydrangea looks like a weed whacker went after it, but it was just bunnies.  Most of the trees and shrubs that we expended water on look pretty good this spring, which shows that winter cold often gets the blame for death caused by prior drought. A dwarf hemlock looks OK, and given TPP's track record with this species (0 for 3 attempts) it's a good sign for it to just be alive.  Our nominee for most improved (at this point) is a flowering quince that got severely bunnied last year, but recovered very nicely from within it's cage.  A Pieris has better flower buds than it has had for many years. Hoping for one or two  magnolias to flower for the first time: odds on butterfly magnolia - almost certain; odds on Oyama magnolia - still a long shot. A better evaluation of the patients will be possible as the season progresses.  Bright note: Iris reticulata multiplied nicely since last year (their first), and it's such a cheerfully colorful early bulb when planted in mass.  Drought didn't matter much because they go dormant in the summer heat. 

A fool's bet

A creationist kinesiologist named Mastropaolo  is getting his 15 minutes of fame by publically challenging “evolutionists” to bet $10,000 with him that they can’t disprove Genesis, and a hand picked superior court judge gets to decide.  This is almost criminally stupid.  His challenge is based on the false premise that an either-or dichotomy exists, i.e.,  if not evolution, then Genesis.  But if not evolution, why not Valhalla or the Dream time?   Now there’s a reason that we don’t take our scientific findings to court; judges don’t know squat about science and are no better than anyone else at deciding what data means or why it is critical.  The whole legal concept of evidence is quite different from evidence in science.  Might as well challenge this guy to prove that the Norse gods don’t exist, especially on next Thors’day.   Now of course the whole purpose of this exercise is so he can crow about how no one took him up on his challenge, a result that clearly demonstrates the vacuity of science.   Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist that independently thought of the idea of natural selection, got sucked into a similar challenge to prove that the surface of the Earth wasn’t flat.  Wallace had a clever idea.  He knew of a straight canal with series of bridges in a row.  He affixed a stick to each bridge the exact same height above the level surface of the water.  Then backing off one more bridge, Wallace set up a telescope, and voila, the top of each successively further stick was slightly lower than the previous showing that the surface of the "flat" canal was curved by a measurable amount.  Independent witnesses concluded that Wallace had demonstrated that the surface of the Earth was not flat, but the challenger claimed he could see nothing in the telescope and wouldn’t pay up.  And similar blind justice is just what our kinesiologist wants as well; nothing you can say or demonstrate scientifically will disprove anything about Genesis.  And who cares? The bet is  just setting up a straw man so it can be knocked down.  Science has pretty high standards of evidence, and you don’t get to ignore any of it.  If you don’t like an explanation, you must propose a different one that accounts for everything.  This is too tough a game for Mastropaolo, so he wants a different playing field, one that isn’t used in science because rigging the game is the only way he will play, and this tells you all you need to know about him.   

Spring flowering - 2012 & 2013

Spring 2012 was quite bizarre, and while spring 2013 is decidedly late, it's closer to the norm than was 2012.  Yesterday's post snow storm warming resulted in late crocus, aconite, and Iris reticulata popping into bloom as well as the culmination of a very long prelude of hybrid hellebores. This brings the total number of flowering events for our estate to 8 as of March 28th.  Last year the unseasonably warm weather pushed spring flowering along so fast that 92 flowering events had taken place by the same date!  That like 1/3 of everything in our gardens, before April 1st!  2012 was totally out of whack.  In 2010 and 2011 the number of flowering events by 3/28 was 10 and 11 (aconite was new in 2011 accounting for the difference).  Lots of plants are just waiting for a bit of real spring weather: American filbert, numerous bulbs, Abeliophyllum, Cornus mas, Forsythia, Helleborus niger.  And of course the early spring garden work is behind schedule too, but the cold frame crops will be planted this weekend, which is just about normal (~April 1th) for around here.  This also means that the beginning of field season is just around the corner too.  Hope someone burns TPP's prairie! 

Pollen is not plant sperm

Anything plant related, no matter how crazy, gets directed to TPP.  So it was that TPP finds himself being interviewed about seasonal allergies. Right? Actually having talked to a bunch of allergists, the writer found themselves wondering about pollen, so she gets sent to someone who knows a little bit about how pollen works from the floral perspective.  OK, so I know pollen is plant sperm, but why does it irritate your nose?  First, pollen is not plant sperm, it's a whole, albeit microscopically small, male organism, and like all males, it produces sperm after pollination takes place.  What?  It's a male? Then where is the female?  Hmm, this lady is quicker than most of my students who never think to ask that question.  She's there, residing inside each and every ovule, which is not an egg, housed within an ovary, which is not a sex organ.  Those traditional names are a testament to the same misconception about plant sex that you started with.  Pollen isn't sperm; and a plant ovule isn't an egg.  TPP wonders how many times he's explained this during his career and seemingly with no impact what so ever except perhaps on a case by case basis. Misconceptions about plants have more lives, and much longer lives, than a cat.  The true nature of the seed plant life cycle has been understood since Wilhelm Hofmeister published his magnum opus on plant evolution in 1851.  So that's only been a mere 162 years, and still a jacketed megasporangium is called an ovule (although TPP does admit the convenience of the term, which botanists still use while knowing it implies pure wrong thinking).  However, at the end of my lesson, my interviewer said, "Oh, you're good! You explain things so well."  Thank you, and it only took 43 years of practice.

A tiny bit less colorful

This morning was really quite lovely with a promise, a true promise, of spring in the air, but perhaps just a tad less colorful than it was. By strange coincidence, on the way to my coffee shoppe, TPP glanced in the window of a used record store and front and center was a toy Yellow Submarine; how very nostalgic, and this was before discovering that Jack Stokes had died draining just a little bit of color out of the world.  He was best known for being the animation director of the Yellow Submarine.  In 1968 the Yellow Submarine was the epitome of creativity, a story that somehow managed to link a bunch of unrelated Beatles' songs together in a fanciful manner.  The whole animated film was just so imaginative.  TPP thinks his F1 still has a Blue Meanie squeeze toy (Max maybe?).  Clearly the music and the film left an impression on himself. 

Who took the preserved ginkgo?

Specimens are always a problem, and how can you teach students about organisms if you can't put the organism, or at least significant pieces thereof, into their hot little hands?  Let's say you want your students to understand the reproductive structures of a ginkgo, using them to compare to those of conifers, so you have to have specimens.  Now with this in mind, TPP had collected pollen cones and ovulate structures from ginkgo trees and preserved them in ethanol, two half gallon jars of pickled ginkgo, enough to last for years.  The other reason this is necessary is that ginkgo trees don't produce these structures except once a year, usually in the last week of the semester on average, and the lab class is always at a different time of year.  So you go to the cupboard, and there's only one jar; it says ovulate ginkgo on the lid's label, but it's actually pollen cones. Where the bloody hell is the other jar?  Someone used them, and accidentally switched the lids, but for reasons as yet undetermined, did not replace the other jar.  The problem with this is that by the time you figure this out, it's too late.  Even if this had been know at the beginning of the semester, it makes no difference because you can't just go out and buy pickled reproductive structures of ginkgo.  They're only good for just one thing, teaching, and nobody who teaches knows anything.  Something is very suspicious, very suspicious indeed.  There are only so many classes that would use such specimens, and only certain people instruct those classes, so the number of suspects is pretty finite.  Some wandering gypsies didn't make off with them and no ransom notes have been received.  Ginkgo?  Oh, yeah, them trees.  Seems my colleagues have pretty good alibis or very convenient memories.  Guess some things should be kept under lock and key, but TPP is just so trusting.  Now to remember that new specimens are needed when the ginkgo pollination season rolls around again. 

Today's lab - Cycads

Cycads are one of TPP's favorite groups of organisms.  Cycads are the dinosaurs of the plant kingdom, the oldest living lineage of seed plants with a history stretching back to the late Permian, real living denizens of Jurassic Park.  Most people think cycads are palms and some common names (sago palm) suggest as much, but cycads are really, really different.  Generally cycads are more similar to ferns.  They have fronds that develop from fiddle heads and they have their sporangia on modified leaves.  Among gymnosperms, cycads are the only organisms that are predominately insect pollinated. Our glasshouse has 8 of the 11 genera, so that will keep my students busy for awhile looking for cones, fiddle heads, coralloid roots, and all the rest.  The specimen shown is a species of the southern African Encephalartos bearing seed cones.

Snow day - Student interpretation

University campuses are a great place to work, to spend your time, because there's always something going one: mad things, crazy things, zany things, serious things, nothings, etc.  Yesterday was a snow day, so do not come to campus unless you are essential personnel.  Well, students are certainly essential to a university, so what does having a snow day mean to students?  Their obvious interpretation is that a snow day is for playing in the snow.  Since the  primary reason for a snow day is the convenience of commuters, the campus residents are there ready to go, and nature supplied a goodly amount of nice mouldable snow and the accompanying temperatures were quite mild, it was perfect day for snow play.  The main quad of our campus now sports about two to three dozen snow "sculptures", which they must be called since the size and creativity goes far beyond mere snow men, and in several cases the gender was not at all left in question.  A couple of strategically placed snow forts suggested a battle, or at least ambushes of anyone so foolish as to be walking on the sidewalk between them.  In one case a tree had a new suit of clothes around its trunk, but white is wrong for the season.  Perhaps coming to a Youtube near you, an avant-garde film of a young Asian woman in a pink bikini and naught else cavorting in the snow while being pelted with snow balls.  Otherwise, who knows?  So, yes, students certainly know what to do on a snow day.  TPP worked on illustrations for a publication.  Yes, very lame. 

Speaking of snow - and soccer - and Costa Rica

TTP has spent a lot of time in Costa Rica doing research and teaching, and every now and then just being a gringo tourista.  Snow days here in the upper midwest are no big deal really.  But some things, just like dogs and cats together, are just unnatural.  So when TPP saw this soccer game the other day, it was just plain wrong, a crime against nature.  Soccer is one of those games that is played under diverse field conditions, but this was not right.  Cold, OK. Some flurries in the air, OK. But when the ball can't roll because of snow accumulation, this just isn't right.  You can't play the game the way it was meant to be played.  And then there's the whole Costa Rican thing.  They love soccer way more than the USA loves soccer.  It's their love and their pride at stake.  So you take the Costa Rican national team and you ask them to play soccer in a form of precipitation that they have never, ever seen before, a form of precipitation that most Costa Ricans can't even imagine, and it's just plain wrong.  Most of them probably cannot believe even still that they were playing soccer under such conditions, and then to lose late, by one goal; outrageous!  Never has the weather conditions been so stacked against one team before.  Their protest is most appropriate, and hopefully it will be upheld.