Garden Flowering Log - September

No question that as the days get shorter and the nights cooler (still haven't had two cats on the bed temps), the gardening season is winding down and it doesn't look like the Phactors' gardens are quite going to make the 300 plants flowered threshold that Mrs. Phactor had so hoped for. September flowering has added another 12 plants bringing the total plants flowering to 273 for the season, and that doesn't count the orchid and non-hardy azalea that flowered while hanging outside, which while perennials would be pretty cheaty because they aren't garden plants.
Sept 2 - Fall Clematis

Sept 4 - Porcelain Vine

Sept 5 - Japanese anemone

Sept 9 - Fall sedum

Sept 10 - Wood aster, Turtlehead

Sept 11 - Plumose goldenrod

Sept 16 - Showy goldenrod

Sept 18 - New England aster, Toadlily

Sept 20 - Late white Joe Pyeweed

Sept 22 - Lady in Black aster

Going Green Vertically - A new dimension for gardens

These vertical gardens just show what some imagination can yield. Our fair city, which likes to think of itself as creative, but only by the standards of the central midwest (yawn), missed out on a great opportunity to do this with a couple of new public parking garages. The side of this overpass bridge is just great, living art, as is the green building. A couple of our buildings on campus show some potential, but mostly it's just Virginia creeper or English ivy out of control. After some generous benefactor gives us $10 million or so for a new botanical facility, its green roof can get turned on its side, and we'll make their images in plants.

Problem Solving 101 - Higher Education Sets the Example

Here's a wonderful example of bureaucratic problem solving in higher education. The physical plant at our fine institution was looking for ways to cut their operational costs, just like everyone else. And some remarkable intellect figured out that the science buildings were using way more expensive paper towels than other buildings because - gasp!- laboratories have sinks, and sinks need paper towels, and labs need sinks because biology stuff is messy, hands get dirty, and so on. A candidate for outstanding administrator of the year found a way to cut costs by transferring the responsibility for laboratory paper towels to the academic department. Ta Da, the physical plant saves money. Now understand this, all central administrators are in the business of counting beans in the form of credit hours generated, and academic departments who are the only units that cultivate this particular crop are regularly dunned if their credit hours decline, however never, ever are the academic departments ever given the tuition generated. This of course would solve many of the problems right away, and credit hour generation would certainly become important if the people making them got the rewards, but the clear risk is that they might decide they don't need an assistant to the night manager in charge of paper towel distribution. But academic departments when faced with a new cost and a budget that has been static for more than a decade adopt their time honored approach - passing the cost on to students via laboratory fees, which themselves were instituted because not enough of the tuition money made its way back to departments to buy what was needed for teaching laboratory courses. Oh, but increases in fees and tuition are a real no-no right now, bad PR and all that, so the bean counter-in-chief of our particular college declares that this new cost CANNOT be passed on to students. This is a zero sum game, folks. So something has to give, and you may rest assured that our overall budget for such purchases was not what we would call flush. Yikes! Don't say flush! We'll end up buying our own TP! So we will have to do without something that we previously had thought we needed for educational purposes to buy paper towels, or like a nice little day care center we can have all the students bring little towels to lab classes, and that would be OK since it won't show up on the balance sheets. In the meantime someone somewhere is getting the award ready for the person who excelled by cutting costs so well. The same person shall receive the Phactor's short-sighted detriment to education award. Well done everyone!

Are you a true scientist?

Philosopher and keyboard artist Ervin Laszlo can help you answer this question. According to a recent piece at the Huffington Post:
You aren't a "true" scientist if you "confound the record of a religious experience with the meaning of that experience". Hmmm. Whose meaning?
You aren't a "true" scientist if you "judge a religion by the literal veracity of the sayings, episodes, and injunctions contained in its doctrines". Hmmm. OK, we aren't to pay any attention to what the religion teaches.
A "true" scientist would be "reasonably certain...that there are aspects and planes of human experience that far transcend the limits of everyday experience, and they ["true" scientists] would seek to understand that experience". Ah, at last. Yes, the biology of hallucinations is fascinating and explains why hallucinogenic plants are involved with so many of the world's religions. In a pre-scientific world such experiences would be taken as absolute proof of the supernatural, but now we know it's brain chemistry. And have these experiences provided any profound insights into human nature and the natural world? Alas, no.
Well, by now you get the idea, you are not a "true" or "genuine" scientist if you don't simply accept the religious experience at face value rather than saying "your brain was deprived of oxygen".
But this is what really rubs my rhubarb. Any scientist who doesn't agree with Laszlo in neither a "true" or "genuine" scientist. It is to laugh. Only a desperately irrelevant philosopher would use such a rhetorical device and provide us with such a slipshod, second rate contribution to the problem of sorting out the science and religion problem. Stick with the keyboard Laszlo; you're giving philosophy a bad name.

Summer-Autumn transition

Seasons are supposed to transition from one to the other, and the calendar simply marks the solstices and equinoxes, dates based upon the tilted Earth's position in its annual circuit. But this year, our weather seems to have taken the autumnal equinox literally. The last day of summer, a day for some lingering field work, nearly set a high temperature record for that day, a day hot and muggy enough to do July proud. Then zam, pow, autumn arrives over night as a high pressure system pushes into the area dropping the day's high and low temperature by more than 20 degrees (F). Just like that you go from ceiling fans to cats on the bed. Just like that we go from baseball to football, oh, wait, no, it seems baseball is lingering, slowing dying upon its vine like a squash that didn't quite make it to maturity, and football launched itself prematurely showing that it has no respect for season or tradition. At least the weather is improved.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Where?

Well, who knew that would happen? You start a blog a week ago, but finish it a week later, and then publish it and it appears back then? What kind of a system is this? At any rate, today's new Friday Fabulous Flower is back a week.

What is a fruit?

The craziest thing about my blog is the most frequently visited page: Artichoke - a fruit or vegetable? An awful lot of people must have lost sleep over this question because it has been my top ranked blog for the past 2.5 years, and this is hardly a seminal piece of botanical knowledge. However it does suggest that a more general explanation might be informative.
Flowering plants are composed of stems, leaves, and roots, and foods comprised of these parts are technically vegetables, the vegetative parts of plants. But here's the problem. Flowers are also composed of modified leaves borne on a modified stem, and when immature, usually in bud as in broccoli, they qualifiy as vegetables too. Fruits are flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, so fruits must also be modified leaves, but after post-pollination development has begun, they are categorized as fruits (and seeds). Thus the artichoke eaten prior to pollination still qualifies as a vegetable, and what is eaten is the succulent modified stem and the bases of the modified leaves (bracts) surrounding the inflorescence. A strawberry is actually quite similar in that the red fleshy tissue is actually the modified stem of the flower and the "seeds" are actually little dry fruitlets. Sometimes fruits from several flowers will fuse during development to produce multiple fruits: pineapple, mulberry. In these cases perianth parts become fleshy too contributing to the whole. Similar looking fruits can result when a single flower has many separate pistils producing aggregate fruits: raspberry, cherimoya. Some fruits are dry at maturity, although the fleshy types are more frequently and regularly thought of as fruits. Some fruits that are dry at maturity are eaten when they are immature and fleshy: beans and pea pods, okra. This means that many things thought of and eaten as vegetables are really fruits (sometimes including the seeds): cucumber, squash, green beans, snow peas, okra, tomato, peppers, eggplant, to name the more common ones. Confused? Well so is the USDA because they categorize vegetables based on common usage (To the USDA rhubarb is a fruit.) rather than the botanically correct definitions. That's good; it's terrible when your government goes and confuses itself by using science.

Nasty infuriating little things!

It's always those little things in life that are so infuriating, and in this case it's those little stickers they put on the side of fruit. Given the waxy cuticle on many fruits, you have to be pretty impressed that these stickers stay put so well. Nothing short of cutting a chunk out of the side of the fruit will remove those nasty stickers, and it makes you wonder about all the other things you want stuck somewhere that always fall off. So is this the inverse law of the universe? Anything you want unstuck is on there for life, and anything you want to stay in place you can't stick in place no matter what you try. Is this some kind of facultative adhesive? Depending upon the opposite of your desires, it either sticks forever or immediately comes undone. And for educational reasons, the Phactor found himself fighting with dozens of these nasty things upon a great diversity of fruits, and thus my ire surfaces. Next shall we consider all those pins in new shirts or labels sewn onto new slacks.

How many plant species are there?

Back when Linnaeus and the boys decided to name all the world's organisms, the task seemed large, but not insurmountable. Little did they know what the tropics had in store for them. Several problems confound trying to answer the question of how many plant species there are. 1. Botanists keep finding new ones, so the discovery of species continues. 2. It's really hard to know if you have a new species because without a digital database (which is under construction) you cannot check all the herbaria for specimens, and this means many species have been named multiple times. 3. As more and more of the Earth's surface is disturbed and destroyed by human activities, we face the fact that many organisms will become extinct before they are known to science. 4. The botanists who do this kind of research are getting rarer as universities seek to hire new faculty doing the latest, newest, most fundable type of research, and taxonomic research, long devalued and denigrated by people doing the latest, newest type of research, gets left to non-academic institutions like museums and botanical gardens, so few students see or come into contact with this type of science, so the problem is getting compounded. The first attempt to solve the second problem was to publish a list of all the new plant species names producing the Index Kewensis, an effort started by a monetary bequest from Charles Darwin! Using existing databases, taxonomic experts have been attempting to purge the lists of alternative names and determine the 1st published official species name. So far the results indicate 301,000 plant species exist after purging 480,000 alternative names called synonyms, but there are still 240,000 names left to assess, so if the same percentage holds true, then the total number of officially named plant species will be pretty close to 400,000. Not bad, not bad. This totally overwhelmes the diversity of other plant groups: only 1000 species of gymnosperms, 15,000 species of pteridosperms, and 23,000 species of mosses & liverworts. It's good we can figure this out before this type of botanist becomes extinct.

Why does this oak dislike rhododendrons?

Some animosities in the botanical world make perfect sense. Tomatoes and their relatives hate growing in the vicinity of walnuts because of the juglone, but why does my shingle oak so despise the rhododendrons that grow in its shade and benefit so greatly from its accumulated leaf litter? Because of the clay content and high pH, not to mention frigid temperatures, late summer droughts, and desiccating winter winds, rhododendrons and similar semi-soft, acid-loving plants are difficult to grow here in Lincolnland, and having found a near ideal protected setting for a rhododendron bed beneath a large oak at the east end of the house, our spring display of azaleas and rhododendrons is about as good as it gets in this area. So why does this oak drop a constant barrage of limbs upon the defenseless shrubs below? Is it floral display envy? They can hardly be a worthy competitor, and yet every year one or more of the rhododendrons will get maimed, mauled, or crushed by oak limbs. Maybe this oak just has a mean dark streak deep in its heartwood, and having already had a near miss myself, the Phactor suggests that you admire the rhododendrons from a safe distance just beyond the spread of this oak's crown.