Friday Fabulous Flower - Royal Hort Society photographic competition 2013

TPP is surprised people have not been dunning him for the lack of FFF blogs even though it is the off season for flowers.  Really, you people are just too polite, too quiet for your own good.  Well, here's a nice link to images from the UK Royal Horticulture Society's 2013 photographic competition, and yes, it has more than one FFF!  Gardens are so marvelously cheering to see during the winter. TPP's favorite of the images shown here is the view of the Kentwall Hall moat, sans moat monsters.  Last summer the Phactors added a photograph to their art collection that had that same quality to it, almost a still life painting what with the way the light and colors seem.  So enjoy, and don't look at the weather system strung out to the west that is to bring more ice and snow for the whole weekend polished off by more sub-zero weather!  

Lone Star Science

Well, it don't surprise me none that all of the candidates for Lt. Gov. of Texas wants to teach creationism in schools.  This is a special brand of ignorance that doesn't see any difference between what science knows and what they believe, and no matter what, they want their beliefs to be taught as truth  in public schools even though this is only one of many religious truths.  This means that in teaching creationism the state becomes a de facto promoter of the Christian religion, a constitutional no-no.  And no matter what they really think, none of these politicians want to chance any nuanced position no matter how many times creationism has been ruled a purely religious idea. It's not that creationism or its offspring intelligent design are wrong, it's that they are useless.  You can't use them to do science, which also reflects how badly science is being taught, and this is the all important criterion of science: theories must be useful. As my colleague notes: "Evolution isn’t politics, it’s science. And science is a reflection of our attempts to understand how the Universe works. Evolution isn’t a guess, or a cynical move to promote atheism, or whatever feverishly imagined bugaboo flies around in the heads of these four men." Unfortunately such ignorance far from being a deal breaker, this is how you get elected in Texas, and in a number of other states too. It's no wonder that "red states" are leading education in the USA into further decline.

Darn those germy students!

This has been happening for years.  Students go home for the winter break, wallow in the local germs at that location, and then they bring samples of all these different germs back to campus and begin swapping them around creating a new germ pool where everyone lacks immunity to one or more of these cold germs.  Thus just about two weeks after the semester begins TPP gets a cold or the flu. So right on schedule, TPP finds himself and a box of tissue sitting at his laptop in a bath robe.  Since this cold/flu involves a low grade temperature and severe congestion, it probably counts as flu, and adds to an almost perfect record of always getting the flu whenever he's gotten a flu shot.  How totally annoying.  Coincidentally, the university has cancelled classes because of the extreme cold, so no matter what there will be material that will need to be made up. Hard to argue with the closure when one student was found dead of exposure already, although the circumstances remain uncertain. The worst thing is that congested sinuses really ruins the ability to think and concentrate, so it's not like this is a nice break to get a few things done.  Drat.
While watching the TV, my attention was drawn to a commercial where a doctor looking woman was examining some kids and then turns to the camera and says something to the effect I always recommend [brand name] homeopathic cold remedies.  Now either these things are supplements and therefore unregulated or they are remedies. Of course they want it both ways because these are purely bogus remedies but it's pretty safe to recommend them for a "cold" because mostly you get better anyways, so anything at all will work as well. 

Yo-yo weather here in Lincolnland

Here in the upper Midwest long time residents will tell you that if you don't like the current weather just wait a few minutes and it will change.  Today the high temperature will be just above freezing, and it's almost balmy in comparison to the severe cold and wind chills of the previous week.  Now another Arctic front will arrive in a couple of days to repeat this pattern.  This is producing temperature swings of around 30 C.  These cold snaps are not actually unusual or more severe than expected for this  region, however they have been less and less common in the past two decades so now these Arctic fronts seem colder and more severe.  The amount of snowfall has not been all that great, but the extended cold has kept what snow we have gotten on the ground. This resulted in a near assault on our person by anxious squirrels and birds while restocking all of the feeding stations. In addition to feeding the wildlife, it provides wishful cat entertainment.  People this year have taken an inordinate interest in the gold fish that occupy our lily/lotus pond. Naturally, the pond is frozen over, but a compressor is continuing to pump air into the pond so it should not become anaerobic. At a recent gathering of garden devotees, everyone wanted to talk about potential damage to plants.  Well, it's a wait and see game, just like with the fish. Right now the temperature is falling, fast, so the Arctic front is arriving and with it a lot of wind. How nice.

Chase those winter blues shoes!

Ladies, Depressed?  Cold?  Got those mid-winter blues?  Planning a sunny cruise or tropical get away?  Well, if TPP is any judge, here's some garden sandals that will chase away any winter blues and put a smile on your face.  Normally TPP would buy a pair of these for Mrs. Phactor without hesitation except for the factor of 10 rule, which is when splurging on such a gift, the complementary sun dress, jewelry, and hand bag will end up costing him at least 10 times more than the original gift.  Oh, yes, he has data!  At any rate, these sandals by Mohop, an ecofriendly company (kickstart campaign here), are just purely cheerful.  Sorry guys.

Frost cracks in trees

Frost cracking of trees has been in the news because it does become more prevalent in very cold weather, but frost cracks are generally misunderstood, even by "tree experts". When water freezes, it expands, a rare and fortunate quality.  Most solids are denser than their liquid phase, and if this were true for water, ice wouldn't float and the other consequences are quite horrifying (read about Ice 9 in Vonnegut's novel the Cat's Cradle).  So when the water in sapwood freezes and expands it can exert enough force to forcibly crack a tree vertically, often with a loud, sharp retort.  However the ultimate cause of the crack, often determining whether the wood of a tree will or will not crack, is a prior injury to the bark and vascular cambium that often could have occurred years if not decades before. The wound healing that follows such an injury to a tree produces a radially aligned weak zone in the wood, one that extends vertically far beyond the original injury.  TPP knows this because in a former research life he spent a couple of years dissecting damaged trees under the guidance of Alex Shigo, a renown tree pathologist (his publications on trees for general consumption can be bought here).  All frost cracked trees showed evidence of prior injury, and in urban settings the most common cause of injury is lawn mowers.  Pay attention to your trees people; whacking them with your darned lawn mower isn't a good thing, nor is lawn for that matter.  Such injuries greatly limit the life span of your trees. Once frost cracked, the crack may heal over at their surface, but internally the crack remains, and it weakens the tree especially with regards to twisting forces from the wind.  So the number of trees cracking in very cold weather only makes evident the number of trees with prior wounds.  On our campus before they started putting mulch around the base of new plantings, nearly 100% of the trees were basally damaged by lawn mowing.  It is doubtful that cracks mainly occur on the SW side of trees as the wounds are more randomly placed, but real data is lacking and to say it generally occurs on one side of trees is nothing more than a tree fable. 

Tropical interlude

Yesterday was cold, today is colder, and tomorrow will be bitter cold; enough already.  Unfortunately as TPP ages, he finds he's more sensitive, or less tolerant, of cold than he used to be, even for a tropical botanist.  The best therapy is a visit to our glasshouse to breath in humid air and smell organic smells. It is very comforting, and there are two nicely placed "lawn" chairs for just the purpose of tropical therapy. 

This episode of very cold weather, the 2nd this month, may help people understand that this is winter, and it's when fronts push down from Saskatchewan in the great white north bringing in that imported Arctic weather, and while the last such front pushed down strongly and deeply, the so-called polar vortex, this event is not unusual nor atypical, but a regular, cyclical event here in the mid-continent.  As a consequence, the only relief that can be offered is to cheerfully attempt to improve your attitude with a nice, idyllic tropical scene from southern hemisphere so you will know that it looks exactly like this right now.  Note the crowds of snow-birds, the commercialized over-development, the evidences of modern e-connected life.  Oh, yes!  See how much easier it is to deal with the cold now!  Hmmm.  There must be a research project that needs doing there right now.  Turn off the internet and pack the field gear!   

Cold and plant hardiness

It's been cold, seriously cold, and while restating the obvious, it perhaps prompted a reader to ask about the effect of extreme wind chills upon plants.  OK, this is an easy one; wind chill doesn't affect plants.  Only the absolute temperature matters, not how the wind makes the cold feel to us and other animals. Recently our absolute temperature hit -17 F (-27 C), and this is very near the rock bottom hardiness for zone 5 plants. In TPP's 35 years here in northern Lincolnland, the coldest it has been is -19 F. This is the absolute limit for freezing-avoiders, a topic discussed before. Until spring you really don't know what damage has been done to what plants.  Some tender woody plants will die back, and many will sprout from the base, so be patient before cutting things back.  Our Vitex (chaste tree) will certainly be in this category.  Over the past couple of years all of it survived the winters and it had gotten 2.5+ m tall.  My Mother, a native southerner, had a pet mimosa tree in upstate New York that survived because it was planted where the ample snow fall always drifted providing it with insulation.  Granted the mimosa never grew much taller than 4 feet, but she like it anyways and in bloom it often stopped traffic.  So snow cover makes a big difference, as does mulching.  This year the deep cold came with snow, so low growing things and herbaceous perennials will probably be largely undamaged.  In a few cases TPP is worried because either he or the nurserymen were cheating by planting marginally hardy plants (TPP) or over stating the hardiness of some plants (a lot of plants labelled zone 5 on nursery tags are not so rated anywhere else).  OK, so you gamble.  But it will be another 4 months before the data can be collected about what was damaged and what was not.  Another problem associated with this is that winter kill is more often about dehydration, especially of evergreens, both conifers and other types, than it is about cold.  If you stopped watering newly planted evergreens when the weather got cooler, and drier, then you put them at risk.  Again, mulching helps greatly.  Now stay tuned because next TPP will explain about frost cracks in trees and why it happens and why it doesn't.

MLK Day - Monday

It's a strange, quiet Monday what with classes cancelled for MLK Day.  This has always struck TPP as a strange thing to do, cancel classes, when what you want is for students to learn something.  It doesn't make sense.  As a result, classroom buildings are silent as a tomb, although graduate students are putting the time to good use and are in the labs.  Faculty are working on projects (a presentation on unusual ornamental gymnosperms) and trying to stay ahead of their classes for another week (specimens for laboratory study). Darwin Day (Feb 12) is coming up, but we won't be cancelling classes for that.  It would be good if every one's classes did a bit on Darwin, if for no other reason, to get a rise out of that segment of the student body that doesn't do, or like, or understand science.  Even among our biology majors there are some creationists, sort of stealthy they are, having been primed to stay quiet and get those teaching certificates so then they can get teaching jobs and present the real truth, devoid of all evidence.  At any rate, it'll be time to decide what kind of cake to get for Charles, and how to decorate it. Last year it was the route of the HMS Beagle. The lesson is easy, if you want students to pay attention to MLK, and what he did, get them cake.  

Governor is a misunderstood environmentalist not a political trickster

The governor of Joysey, Crisp Crusty, or something like that, has been in the news a lot lately for political dirty tricks.  However, the governor's actions were clearly misunderstood.  Closing lanes on the GW Bridge to create traffic jams had the primary purpose of convincing people to abandon commuting by car and as a consequence, encouraging people to use mass transportation. Yes, nothing like a daily traffic jam of an hour or so to make public transport an attractive alternative.  Crisp Crusty should be thanked and praised for his selfless, bully efforts to promote public transportation.  Negative reinforcement is like using onerous taxation to curb cigarette smoking, but modesty prevented the governor from making this environmental claim, and now people have leaped to an unfortunate conclusion that it was somehow about politics. Boy, how cynical people have become.