What gardeners like - bargains

Those of us infected by the gardening virus can develop quite a plant habit. TPP has never dared keep track of what he spends annually on plants purchases and other gardening expenses.  However, when you are sitting on your patio sipping a margarita while surveying your gardening domain, the only word that comes to mind is priceless. Nonetheless TPP keeps his eye open for bargains, as an excuse if nothing else.  As Mrs. Phactor points out that at our age buying a 1-gallon-sized tree because it's cheap isn't really any bargain.  Still the lure of a good bargain is hard to pass up. In the fall of 2014 TPP was looking at the sale items leftovers in the garden shop of a big box store and there were some sort of bushy magnolias in 5 gallon pots and they looked quite nice considering. The tag indicated that they were Magnolia x. loebneri 'Leonard Messel', a hybrid between Magnolia kobus and a pink variety of M. stellata, but the two are rather similar species anyways, so no surprise the plants quite look like a Star magnolia, but pink flowered.  But the kicker, the thing that brought joy to TPP's heart was that a magnolia he lacked cost $20.  And it's proving to be a lovely plant so far, an absolute bargain by anyone's standard. 

Native plant sort of

TPP is not a native plant purist because he is also a compulsive plant collector.  Hey, everything is native somewhere.  However in a rather gray area are cultivars of native plants where the species is native, but cultivars exist.  Generally these grow fine because the basic genome is adapted to your area.  Here's one of these problematic plants that is a quite handsome spring woodland ephemeral, rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides formerly Anemonella thalictroides - buttercup family)(Yes, another taxonomic change that is messing with 40+ years of memory).  The cultivar has pinky-purple foliage more or less retaining a juvenile character because young shoots are more pigmented than the mature foliage.  The cultivar also has some pigmentation in the flowers, which are more or less white in the wild.  And the flower is doubled, so stamens develop as petalloid sepals.  In the wild the flowers can have 5-10 petalloid sepals (It always bothered students when the number was 6 and they head the wrong way in the ID key) and the color is variable with naturally occurring pinky flowers not uncommon, but never seen a wild one doubled.  However this is not an unusual type of developmental aberration in the buttercup family. How can you not like this little plant? It's cute. Those flowers are not quite an inch in diameter and as you can determine both  from the date and the leaf litter, they flower early.

Blogger tech problems function of 10

That's a function of windows 10.  For reasons still uncertain TPP's laptop upgraded itself (never gave it permission) to Windows 10 and for the most part it has not been a problem, but for some reason, the new browser will not open blogger from my blog.  Of course, Blogger is quite long in the tooth, but FoS operates my blog from it, so now sure if a switch can be made.  Anyone?  Anyone?  This is by way of saying that new entries may be a bit brief and/or less common until a solution can be found. Any solutions you guys know about would be appreciated. This blog has had a long standing problem of signing onto blogger after consolidation with google; it deals with an ancient unused gmail address that TPP cannot seem to get rid of safely.  But now it just may be that Win10 renders the blogger problem moot.

Pretty exciting without the noise

TPP has long wondered if motorcycle people would still ride them if they were made to run quietly, or is there something about the screaming "here-I-come/go" noise that makes such machines appealing?  So, while this machine looks pretty ZOOM, ZOOM, it's electric so unless it comes with an obnoxious noise emitting option, it's quiet, although pretty exciting otherwise. This may be the trusty stead of futuristic westerns, where ol' Ohm is plugged into a charging station in front of the local saloon. While this nifty looking machine looks like a unicycle, it's actually a bicycle, but both wheels are side by side. This is a pretty nifty looking machine, the UNO, for getting around town. Makes a Segway look pretty dull, eh?

Yard waste pickup - Just in time

Spring cleanup in the Phactors' gardens takes quite an effort. Although a large proportion of our leaves get composted, a lot of leaves gather in and about shrubs, bushes, and the dead aerial stems of herbaceous perennials. And as the buds and shoots issue forth its time to clean up all this stuff. All the twigs and stems make this difficult stuff to compost without grinding it first, and TPP once had a brute of a chopper-grinder that could make mince out of anything smaller than 3" in diameter. However, it was hard to start (a lot of weight to turn over), and frankly, it was a scary beast to use. It was traded to a nice flower-growing lady who teaches 3d grade; she's not afraid of anything. So now the garden "waste" gets composted by our municipality, but they only begin the yard "waste" pickup this coming week.  Bone to pick: please stop calling it waste because it gets composed. Our garden compostables get stuffed into those 30 gallon paper bags, with the help of a nifty plastic funnel that fits just inside the bag providing a wide mouth and a sleeve that keeps twigs and hard stems from puncturing or ripping the bag when you stuff it. Right now the garage is the holding pen for at least a dozen full bags.  So without a pickup this week, Ms. Phactor would have to park her car outside; TPP's is the official "new" car so it stays in.  Oh, the things you do to recycle and compost. It will take many more bags before the cleanup is finished, but this warmish March has moved the work schedule up and with fewer excuses, TPP has gotten an earlier start. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Bloodroot

Our persistently warm March weather has really pushed along the flowering.  Here's a wonderful spring ephemeral, bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, featured this week in our gardens.  It's a small, easy to grow, woodland wild flower in the poppy family, and like many members of the family, it has laticifers and oozes latex when injured, red-orange latex in this case thus both the common name and the generic name referencing blood.  In the days of "likes cure likes" medicinal botany, such likes were avidly sought and thought to be clues to the plant's usefulness. The plant multiplies vegetatively forming such patches in just a couple of years, and here and there seedlings will also appear.  But even a smallish woodland garden has room for lots of these. Each flower has a leaf  wrapped around its flower stalk, a leaf whose rounded apex has characteristic apical sinuses, although they can hardly be seen at flowering stage. 

Down computer memory lane

TPP can't remember all the diverse PC storage media he has been through in just his career.  Let's see: punch cards (older than dirt), magnetic tape, 5" floppy disks, 3.25" floppy disks, zip disks (the worst ever), Bernoulli disks (still a couple in a drawer somewhere & one ancient IBM PC with a functional drive just in case - who remembers DOS commands?), CDs, thumb drives, chip memory (256 mb was considered a lot of memory). Not a pleasant trip down memory lane that, but now they have invented a nano-structured glass disk about the size of a large coin and it's got quite the memory capacity and very stable.  Those of us who've been at this for awhile have all lost some data because not all formats were as reliable as others, like zip disks that were so named because their reliability was zip, and TPP can see from where he sits 3.25" disks, still reliable, but who has a drive for one? (afore mentioned PC) So this new disk can store nearly 300 terabytes (tera- meaning a trillion or one thousand billion) and at regular conditions totally stable for 13.8 billion years, the present age of the universe. Never will you lose those emails or inane twitters again!  But where did you put the dang thing?

What use is a library of dead plants?

What use if s library of dead plants?  When it comes right down to it, that's what an herbarium is. TPP curates one such collection of dead plants, and sooner or later every curator of an herbarium gets asked a similar question at one time or another, either out of genuine curiosity (rare) or because the asker is a Philistine (increasingly common).  This is often followed with some proposal to move or get rid of the collection to make way for something important.

TPP curates a smallish collection, 50,000+ specimens whose primary purpose is in support of teaching and conservation, and it contains some surprisingly important specimens dating back some 200 years, including irreplaceable information about the local flora. 

An ongoing project involves Master Naturalists doing some citizen science.  The idea is to document the flora of a nearby county park with a large area devoted to conservation.  How are you going to know how good of a job you are doing in conserving if you don’t have a baseline for comparison?  Unfortunately 150 years ago the idea of conservation was not a biological concept and my first predecessors were not collecting with an eye toward posterity.  They had no idea how important their collections would be, but if today biologists are so remiss, there is no excuse; it’s important.  In many cases the collection tells us what we are missing already, what formerly grew here. 

A big push is on to digitalize such collections so the data has more wide spread value and use. Someone asked, “Can we throw out the specimens after they have been photographed?” No! Try getting DNA from a photograph, even a high resolution one. And quite frankly even a high-res image isn't the same thing.  It’s interesting that modern students, at least some of them, remain interested and find the collection fascinating to work in.  Which is important too because botanists with TPP’s skill set are disappearing across the USA, as are botany departments, organismal botany courses, and botany majors. Citizen science is a  means of building support and interest among the general public while supporting conservation efforts.

Uh oh, something went terribly wrong!

This does explain a lot. Experiments do sometimes go wrong, and it does explain the orange complexion.  As always, Tom Tomorrow explains what happened that gave us the Incredible Trump.

Flash Gordon styled cargo trike

Shut the barn door!  The F1 used to call TPP's beloved, semi-recumbent BikeE a dork bike. Imagine what she'll say when she sees this classy bike, The Rocket!  It comes as an electrical-assisted model with the optional jet engine noise simulator! OK it's got a USB charging port, but what about the ray gun to vaporize joggers?  Or the anti-dog force field? This is the ultimate in cool rides!