Friday Fabulous Flower - Rose Mallow

It's hard to argue with this herbaceous perennial in terms of flower size, fully open flowers of the rose mallow may be 7-8 inches in diameter. The flowers appear in mid-summer and are borne at the top of 3-4 foot tall stems. Colors range from white, through pinks to red.  Of course they exhibit the hallmarks of the mallow family.  The only problem is that mallows are a favorite food of Japanese beetles, so in years of a bad infestation, these big, beautiful flowers get chewed up pretty badly.  You can't get much of an easier plant to grow. So you just have to ask, "Why don't I have one of these?"  TPP assumes that the rose mallow is a cultivar of Hibiscus moshceutos, and not far off from the marsh mallow, better known for the confection named after it than as the plant itself. 

Robot worries

According to an article at the HuffPo this robot is a security guard at a shopping mall garage.  It's 5 foot tall and weighs 300 lbs, and has a friendly demeanor.  It ran over a toddler "by accident" and didn't notice.  If TPP runs into this guy in a parking garage, and it starts shouting "Exterminate!" "Exterminate!", it's definitely time to run.  Where is the Dr. when you need him?

Squash pollination & fruiting

The F1 has a huge zucchini plant, but yet she reports not many fruit; "They're little and fall off." Ah, a pollination problem, right up TPP's alley.  Garden squash plants are what we call monoecious, one house; they produce two kinds of flowers on the same plant, those producing pollen ("males") and those producing fruit and seed ("female").  They aren't actually male and female, but the explanation takes more effort that TPP has right now.  The plants usually start out producing male flowers, they use less energy to make so plants can start flowering at a smaller size.  The female flowers are easy to distinguish because you can see the immature fruit below the yellow corolla (right side), which is lacking on the males (left). If not pollinated, no more energy is wasted and the flower aborts. This can happen in a small garden, maybe with only 1 zucchini plant because maybe no males flowers were produced on a particular day. However it also could be because you don't have any bees around to move the pollen for you (or you have left a row cover in place too long keeping the pollinating insects our along with the bad guys). If you lack bees you can pick a male flower, tear off the yellow corolla, and swab the anthers on the stigma of one or more female flowers effecting pollination yourself. This can also happen with cucumbers. Bees visit male flowers and collect pollen as a reward; females flowers have stigmas that mimics the males, thus deceiving pollinators into visiting and delivering pollen.  Tricksy plants! Note the flowers are edible themselves, so if you are getting too many squash, try eating some at their smallest stage.
For more information on raising squash and their relatives go to Renee's Garden.  The image used above is from this site.

A teaching manifesto of merit

The tattooed professor is new to TPP, but TPP likes this guy, and we likes his teaching manifesto as well. For the first 2/3 of his career TPP taught in large introductory biology classes, both majors and nonmajors, and how well he remembers needing summers to recharge until finally it got to the point where that burned out feeling would not go away. Only then did TPP begin a second career teaching botany to people who wanted to learn it. 
As a long-time observer of higher education here in Lincolnland, the cost of higher education is not because of the high salaries paid to lazy faculty, it's not because of having too many administrators, and it's not because of inefficiences and waste, it's because a long time ago, 30 or so years, our legislators decided to shift the responsibility of paying for higher education to the student and their families. They did this by simply gradually withdrawing state support. So tuition had to cover the difference and real cost increases and unfunded mandates as well, as a result tuition has been rising faster than the cost of living.  TPP has seen state support drop from around 60% of the cost to 16% of the cost, to no state support at all this past year.  So higher education is no longer affordable to many people, and this was a choice our state made, but not by coming right out and saying it. Cleverly the very people who made these decisions found it easy to criticize the educational institutions themselves, blaming the educators!  State supported colleges and universities have been great equalizers, and TPP appreciates the opportunities they afforded him; no ivy-league or private schools in TPP's background, just plain blue-collar botany bought and paid for by his own effort.
But at least it was possible. It should be again.

A lot of water under the bridge...

On or about 45 years ago, and a few hours ago, the Phactors were wed.  It is quite hard to believe. 45 years is a long time and yet it doesn't seem so very long.  Over our evening cocktails (Mrs. Phactor was drinking a cold sparkling rose out of a silver goblet from the wedding, but they just don't work for margaritas. Our monogrammed silver mint julip cups, a wedding present from KY cousin Dan, continue to function just fine.) we were trying to remember certain events that took place on or about this time so many years ago, but with not very good recall on several issues.  Memory just fails us.  It's crazy what you do remember but sad what you forget. A best friend's wedding at which we apparently took no pictures.  And were TPP's parents present?  Not certain at all.  One thing is certain, and that is tomorrow is Mrs. Phactor's birthday, 49 me thinks, and not to be forgotten because of juxtaposition with this wedding thing as TPP was reminded so very many years ago. So yes, he  faithfully has gotten his bride a birthday gift.  The monstrous Hostapedia should keep her amused for a day or two, but even it may not help ID a couple of unknown varieties.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - prettiest no-no you can plant

TPP just reminded himself about one of his most important garden rules: never plant a loosestrife. They simply will not behave and they are difficult to eradicate once they are in your garden. Last year (one year after planting) a small patch of Lysimachia ciliata looked grand next to our pond, but this spring it erupted to occupy a greatly expanded area; yikes! After a rugged extraction, TPP now notices that bits of rhizome survived and are trying to reestablish the patch. It won't happen, but you pays the price for being stupid and planting a loosestrife in the first place.  Now today's feature plant the gooseneck loosestrife (Lysimachia clethroides) is not quite so explosively invasive, and it is a totally lovely plant, but the patch covers a pretty extensive area and Mrs. Phactor has decided it's coming out, just not yet.  But it is quite attractive what with the white flowers in a shady area and the graceful curve of the raceme. Don't be seduced!

Another reason to dislike the sticky plastic labels on fruit

Those little oval sticky (PLU - price look up) labels applied to every piece of fruit larger than a grape in grocery stores are terrible things and TPP dislikes them very muchly.  First, they are almost impossible to remove short of damaging the fruit by removing the peel.  OK if it's an avocado or banana, but not so OK on other fruits. Or worse, you're cutting up fruit, don't notice the label and then you see it's one third gone and you have to sort through the cut up fruit to find the other 1/3. Leaving it on the fruit would get you chopped from one of those cooking programs for certain. As if you needed another reason to hate those labels, here it is. Those labels are forever! They do not decompose!
Back story: TPP decided that it was time to remove the composed material from one of our 3 composers (about 8 cubic feet each). It had been 2 or 3 years, so it was well composed, and filled with nasty little biting ants for a bonus, just the right stuff for top dressing the asparagus bed.  In the process of digging the material out several of those little plastic labels emerged, totally legible and intact, less the sticky.  So future archaeologist will find them and wonder about their significant.  Fruit tokens? Fruit totems? Reminders of what fruit it is? 
So sticky labels on fruit go into the Not Green category of useless (? not quite useless), infuriating things that should be outlawed, particularly where attached to composable items.  Grocery stores are you listening? Get some check out clerks that know the produce so they don't have to scan each piece. 

Garden hostatility to records

The 4th was a bit of a lazy day for the Phactors.  Took a road trip Sunday to big hosta, day lily, perennial nursery, Hornbaker's, and its worth visiting just to see their mini - botanical/display gardens. Warning, it isn't near anything, unless you call Princeton, IL, something (lots of antique shops). Mrs. Phactor was in particular shopping for small hosta varieties to finish up a garden next to the patio. Recent garden visitors asked about the "names" for a number of plants and it pointed up the lack of labeling, and what with aging memories, an effort to identify and label the hosta varieties that reside in our gardens seemed like a good idea. Descriptions like "it has heart-shaped blue-green leaves" doesn't help much in distinguishing between "Blue moon", "Blue angel", "Blue jay", "Blues Brothers", and so on. Nonetheless some progress was made and who's going to know if we didn't get them all correct? It looks like we knew what we were doing.  Then there's the problem of the labels themselves. Garden plant labels never seem to last, survive, from one season to another. white plastic knives and sharpee markers are the best, most economical solution so far.  Garden denizens seem oddly attracted to labels and actively seek to shift them around or hide them or remove them completely. Thus we began an effort to map portions of our gardens so plants could be identified by relative position to each other. It's harder than it sounds. Wonder if photos can be turned into maps in some way, maybe some landscaping software. Still some question marks remain. Dividing clumps just makes matters worse with poor bookkeeping. So you end up picking a leaf and looking for a match.  In the end about 7/8s got properly IDed, but still we have no complete tally.  Some of the hosta beds pre-date our purchase of the property, probably by decades.
How did the Phactors end up in such a fix? Well, at first the names of the varieties added didn't seem to matter, and then eventually it did matter, and then it got totally out of hand. Who knows how many different varieties we have 40 or so is a good estimate. Well, someone has a birthday coming up so TPP will seek a hosta reference book for a present.

Identify this unknown fruit

This is quite typical of the email TPP receives, a picture and a request to identify the item in this case a fruit.  Now the correspondent, a zoological colleague, actually asked what type of fruit this is, i.e., a category, like multiple, which is what it looks like, but really they wanted to know what they had eaten. That's all the information.  Anyone? Anyone? OK my colleague was actually in Mauritius which is more than TPP was told at the outset.  Any ideas? Anyone had this fruit?  

In the category of exotic fruits, some friends were trying to figure out what they had seen recently at the local grocery.  It was a jackfruit, and TPP saw one quite excited lady of Asian descent carting one away.  Don't know how good jackfruit are here in Lincolnland. The store also had Mrs. Phactor's favorite tropical fruit, passion fruit. And considering how nice she's been TPP naturally thought of buying her a couple at $2.49 each! Uhhh, no! When you've been places were they sell for a 5 cents, it's hard to pay such a tariff for the travel. The vine on our apartment's fence was producing several a day, and that's what got her hooked.

Friday Fabulous Flower - water nymph(aea)

OK nothing too exotic, just a water lily, but it was such a nice image, the white tepals against the darker background.  People always ask about the damned fish, to which TPP answers, "It's a lily pond that just happens to have a few fish in it."  No one even notices the difference between waterlilies and lotus. Got a half inch of rain yesterday, but pond loses water to evaporation quickly in the summer. Turning off the cascade at night reduces the rate to loss. More rain please.