Submissions for Berry-go-Round #24

Give me your tired, poor, blogs;
Your tortured prose yearning to be set free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming imagination and bizarre interests.
Send those botanical blogs to me, those reader-less, link-lost refugee blogs;
I will lift my fingers, illuminate their contents, and they will become Berry-go-Round #24.

Submissions can be sent to: phytophactor at google mail dot com. And google mail is abbreviated gmail.

Bicycles made of bamboo

Innovative new uses for plant materials is always such cool thing, but this one is really amazing, and award winning too – a bicycle made from bamboo, thus Boo Bikes (TM). Bamboo is a grass, and it stems are not woody, but all those vascular bundles weaving through the stem are fused together making a very strong, light, flexible plant material. Ride on.

250th is a good year for Kew Gardens

The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew celebrated its 250th birthday in 2009, and during this year botanists working there added over 250 new plant species (actually 292) to science. This feat and the amount of taxonomic research taking place at Kew can be put into perspective when you understand that on average about 1000 new plant species are described each year (Kew averages 200.). This accomplishment does not come easily. It took people working in the field collecting specimens in over 100 countries, collecting thousands of specimens, and then matching and comparing them with what is known, only to find some few that remain unknown. A rather frightening finding (at least it is if you know something about biology and diversity) is that nearly a third of these new species are in danger of extinction largely through habitat destruction. And of course knowing what exists and where diversity exists is the scientific basis for conservation efforts. If you want to see some of these discoveries and read more about them, visit the Kew Gardens web page.
OK, the Phytophactor had to pick his favorite new species, Isoetes eludens, a quillwort, which is part of the most ancient living lineage of vascular plants, the clubmosses. Wow! Doesn't that just take your breath away! Quillworts are a lot more common than people think because most people just don’t frog around in their shallow water habitats checking out reedy looking plants. When the water dries up quillworts die back to a perennial corm. Although they do not look it, quillworts are living descendents of arborescent lycopods of the Carboniferous era. Hey, don’t mock it, birds mostly don’t look like dinosaurs either. This one was found by Stephen Hopper, Kew's director, in temporary rock pools in South Africa, a country that is a hot bed of plant diversity .
HT to a BBC news story.

Relief from winter doldrums: 5. Plant catalogs

Seed and plant catalogs are the earliest harbingers of spring that exists. Yes, only 2-3 short weeks after the holiday gift catalog deluge ends, the spring seed and plant catalog arrivals begin! Egged on by promissory pictures, you get to whallow in midwiner gardening dreams and expectations. You get to make selections to fulfill your every garden fantasy, and maybe even order something if your budget allows. It's such great fun that the Phactor doesn't even mind this departure from the ecological straight and narrow. Hard to know why some catalogs keep coming, but apparently mailing lists are forever. It's not because of purchases because the Phactor buys most of his common garden plants and seeds from local family owned garden shops. Although seeds of those orange Turkish eggplants are calling out to be bought.
So readers, what catalogs send the most shivers of anticipation up your gardening spines?

Relief from winter doldrums: 4. Fun in the Kitchen

Yes, the Phytophactor likes to cook and make things in the kitchen having had the fortunate childhood background of parents who cooked and still did lots of "old fashioned" things like canning fruits and vegetables, making katsup, jam, & jelly, and smoking their own bacon and ham. Once you know what the real stuff is like, and have the satisfaction of having made it yourself, the commercial facsimilies seldom compare well. A surplus of red currents and cranberries long stored in the freezer were turned into a wonderful jelly. A stash of black and yellow mustard seeds and a bottle of stout that was not to my liking were combined into a stout mustard. A big pot of mulligatawny soup was made to keep us fed a couple of days during our busy week. And lastly a whole array of items were combined into a batch of home made Worchestershire sauce, and even more amazing, everything needed (tamarind concentrate, molasses, soysauce, anchovy fillet, cardomom, chile de arbol, cinnamon stick, garlic, ginger, onion, sugar, pepper corns, cloves) was in the cupboards! This amazing recipe came from Saveur magazine (Jan. 2009), and is well worth the effort, but the 3 week wait while it all steeps challenges the patience. And the frigid weekend passed without hardly a moments boredom.

Relief from winter doldrums: 3. Plan a trip to the tropics

What could be a better escape from the winter doldrums than planning a trip to the tropics? An invitation to speak at a symposium at the 2010 Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation meetings provides all the excuse the Phactor needs! And where you might ask is this international scientific organization going to hold their meetings? Bali! Part of the Indonesian archipelago. Unfortunately the meeting is not until July and by then the weather in Lincolnland will be approximating a tropical climate, but the idea is to think about it now. This image shows the spectacularly terraced rice paddies of the central highlands, a terrain you would think was too steep for rice cultivation.

Relief from winter doldrums: 2. Visit the greenhouse

Lincolnland is still in the grips of cold and snow, although it does look pretty right now. Usually the midwest is just sort of snowlessly bleak. But for the second in my series on seeking relief from the winter doldrums, let's visit the greenhouse and see what's going on that isn't monochromatic.

This is a pretty spectacular flower, Thunbergia mysorensis. As the specific epithet suggests, this vine is native to southern India. A pair of reddish bracteoles encloses the base of each flower providing a constant display as the flowers open sequentially bottom to top. Morphologically; the inflorescence is pendent so the bottom is at the top and each flower twists 180 degrees to attain the correct orientation. The flowers produce copious nectar, often enough to drip over the bottom lip of the corolla, and are bird pollinated. The stigma and stamens occupy the top of the corolla tube where depending upon the stage of flowering (pollen accepting or pollen dispersing) one or the other makes contact with the visiting bird's head. Enjoy.

Relief from winter doldrums: 1. Tropical beaches

Having spent a considerable amount of time in the wet tropics "down under", the Phytophactor has a great affection for citizens of "Oz". So it irritates me to no end when an ugly American, referring to any USA citizen who engages in loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless and ethnocentric behavior when abroad, demeans this fine country and its people, to wit, criticizing the attire, or lack thereof, of women in the tropics. On my first visit to Queensland's tropics, the plane landed at what amounted to a car port, and a sarong clad young woman appeared and draped a floral lei around my neck. Loved the place ever since. So what of this fine moral young Marine? Clearly he's a wanker.
Oh,yes, this story definitely needs a picture, and this one is sort of appropriate, one Peaches Geldof showing some minimalist tropical beach attire, an image from the UK's Daily Mail, who applied the unnecessary black out, an image sent in response to a blog the Phactor did some weeks ago on botanical tattoos.

Miss Peaches, a very botanical moniker, sports a stylized daisy chain being nibbled by a unicorn, a tattoo of little botanical value, although there was an age, decades ago, when the canvas would have been of some greater interest than the art, but certainly nothing offensive to my delicate sensibilities is evident. One does worry about such young women with such a name though who are these unfortunate pseudocelebrities due to the fame and fortune of their family, and my guess is that Peaches' intellectual development is sagging a bit behind.

See how that banishes winter for a few brief moments?

Berry-go-Round #23 - Start the New Year with a roundup of plant blogs

Head on over to Agricultural Biodiversity Blog and enjoy a wonderfully diverse Berry-go-Round blog roundup. As always the Phytophactor found them interesting and informative.

Out of this world botany!

Botany in movies and on TV is usually absolute and utter crap, and it ruins it for me. Plants frequently are a give away that the filming was done in a location distant from where the action was supposed to take place. Even pure escapist garbage gets really annoying like a recently viewed "Librarian" episode where the hero finds quaking aspen is a Louisiana bayou and it's supposed to be part of some Christian legend which of course would have been set in the Eastern Mediterranean. CSI is ever rediculous in their pin-point plant identifications from a single trichome recovered at a crime scene. Except I did see one of my mentors ID a plant from just a trichome once. So imagine my surprise to learn that even when it doesn't matter, i.e., purely science fiction, the makers of Avatar consulted a botanist! Wow! It happens so seldom, but of course we are are the only ones who know because no one else notices. At least this gives me a reason to see the film.

As an added bonus, my colleague recommends some "other-wordly" plants you can grow in your garden. Enjoy!