gravity’s rainbow

Promising sentence: Reproduction in these species may be aberrant.

Unfortunately, the next paragraph did not go into any detail.

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Welcome to the 9th edition of Berry Go Round, your favorite botanical carnival!  This is my very first carnival hosting experience, so I hope you like it!

I’m taking a plant morphology class this semester, and my professor has me a bit wary about the looming section on ferns with statements like “if you think this is complicated, just wait until we get to ferns.”  Christopher Taylor over at Catalogue of Organisms has a great post up on the details of a fern life cycle that I will certainly be referring back to!  Did you know that the “normal” fern plant with two sets of chromosomes develops from a totally different looking fern plant with just one set of chromosomes?  Luckily, the panic induced by trying to figure such crazy things out is greatly reduced by actually looking at ferns.  Emily has many incredible pictures of ferns at her blog, No seeds, no fruits, no flowers: no problem, like this lovely fertile frond of Blechnum spicant.

Blechnum spicant

Mary has another very informative post up, this time about the Verbena Family.  Since I have a special place in my heart for plants with angular stems, I particularly enjoyed this post.  Who needs a plant taxonomy class when you can just read A Neotropical Savanna?

At botanizing, we are treated to a beautiful post that may cause you to take a closer look at inconspicuous orchids.

Botany Photo of the Day recently profiled the somewhat mysterious Jovellana punctata, which I promptly fell in love with (don’t worry, there’s no bad poetry hiding behind that link).

Jovellana punctata

Matt Mattus at Growing with Plants shares several gorgeous fall blooming plants and his enviable tomato harvest.  If you aren’t jealous, don’t tell me.  I don’t want to hear about how easy it is to grow tomatoes when you don’t live in the desert.

Allium callimischon ssp. haemostictum

Seeds Aside regales us with the history of tomatillos, which he refers to as miltomate.  In northern Arizona, we’ve already had a few close calls with frost this year.  I’m hoping the tomatillos from our garden fill out before the first hard freeze.  I’m pretty jealous of the bounty from verdure’s garden.

And speaking of gardens, GrrlScientist and the very respectable Professor Steve present their recent trip to Darwin’s garden.  There are some absolutely gorgeous flower photos, so make sure you go check it out.

Thanks to everyone who submitted to this edition!  I’m not sure where the next Berry Go Round will be hosted, so while I do some sleuthing, go check out last month’s edition over at Not Exactly Rocket Science and don’t forget to submit entries for October’s Berry Go Round, which will be hosted at Catalogue of Organisms.

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Math is beautiful.

No, plants probably won’t save us from global warming.

Diets don’t work, and people know it.  Weight watchers and all you other diet companies, I hope something really really awful happens to you.  You took advantage of hateful attitudes towards fat people and fanned the flames of self hatred for profit.

My new favorite plant, Jovellana punctata:

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Biology in Science Fiction’s post on A Field Guide to Surreal Botany was featured in this month’s Berry Go Round.  I am now desperate to read it:

an anthology of fictional plant species that exist beyond the realm of the real. … Fully illustrated in gorgeous full-color by Janet Chui, the specimen entries are by turns witty, hilarious, and very strange.

Also, I’ll be hosting the next Berry Go Round on September 28th.  I can’t wait to see what interesting things get submitted!

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Sara Robinson writes about John McCain’s betrayal of the troops and how he’s paving the way for an army no one wants to see at Campaign for America’s Future.

Drive by botany in New South Wales at The Reluctant Botanist.

A short report on breast ironing in Cameroon at current tv.

How drunk do you have to be to fall asleep with a knife in your back?

At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says.

After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance.

…

Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will.

“We were drinking and what doesn’t happen when you’re drunk?” he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

IPCC estimates of sea level rise are way too conservative.

Turning food into gas for your car makes people starve.

The very best explanation of the infuriating, demoralizing subtleties of sexism I’ve ever read.

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

Best science class ever.

Fern poetry.

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The 3rd edition of Berry Go Round is up at Greg Laden’s Blog.  I had a big presentation today that went quite well, so I treated myself and sat down and read the whole thing this evening.  There are all sorts of wonderful in this carnival, including a 5 meter tree that can sting and KILL you and XXX plant porn.  My post about dying coihue trees even made it in!

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Day two was way more fun. We did a little early morning botanizing around our campsite in San Simeon, then jumped in the car again.

We drove just a little ways to Point Piedras Blancas and hung out at the beach with the seals for a few hours. This one was waving his flipper a lot. Possibly he was saying hello. More likely, he was waving off some bugs.

When we were done looking at the seals we drove a bit further north to the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park and set up camp. Then we went on a hike.  The hike started in the redwoods. We were in a grove of fairly small trees, but I was still impressed with how huge they were.

This part of the forest was very wet.  There were all sorts of cool mosses and even a banana slug.  We hiked through the redwoods until we got to a waterfall and a steep turn in the trail.

At that point the vegetation became very different and it got a lot hotter.  The plants on this part of the trail were more likely to have strong scents when the leaves were crushed.  We all smelled of salvia and sage after this part of the trail, which was good because we hadn’t showered in a while.  We took a long break at the top and ate a lot of m&m’s.

After our break, we headed back and went down to Pfeiffer beach.  The road there was a bit scary, but no one died.  We climbed around on the rocks looking at rare dudlyea species, checked out some algae, and watched the sunset.

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Plants from the stop on day one near the Granite Mountains:

• A species of Phacelia with pretty cool photoactive compounds. If you touch the plant and then are exposed to the sun, you get a wicked rash. I refrained from touching it.

• I was really excited about Isomeris arborea, which is a member of the caper family. It had very tasty flower buds. The seed pods were a bit too spicy for me though!

• The popcorn flower is a really cute member of the borage family.

• We also ran across at least one species of Camissonia from the evening primrose family. Most people are more familiar with the non-desert genera of this family, like fushias. I couldn’t find a picture of the one we saw, so you’ll just have to trek out there and have a look yourself.

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For spring break, I went on a trip with my school’s Botany Club. We drove through the desert to Big Sur, then down along the coast to Santa Barbara. There was a great deal of botanizing.

We all made it to the meeting point at 5AM and miraculously managed to fit all of our stuff in the van. Botanists do not travel light. The Jepson Manual (which I now want, along with Botany in a Day, Plant ID Terminology, and Flowering Plant Families) is as big as my torso and the plant press was bigger than my backpack. I won’t list the other gazillion ID books and tools we brought along…

The first day we drove and drove and drove. I saw a lot of creosote and ocotillo from the window.

I wish the ocotillo had been in bloom! I’ll just have to go back.

There were also a lot of Joshua trees and one lonely Canary Island Pine.

We did get to make one stop in the desert near the Granite Mountains. Check out some of the plants we got to see here. I really started to fall in love with the desert on this part of the trip.

I was very impressed with the attempts California is making to use renewable energy sources. Near Barstow was a huge field of solar collectors and we passed many many windmills on the way to Tehachapi. (If you go to Tehachapi, you should eat at the Apple Shack.) I thought the windmills were incredibly beautiful and stood in stark contrast to the oil rigs near Lost Hills. Plus the windmills didn’t stink.

We finally stopped for the night in San Simeon. We set up the tents in the dark, then headed to the beach. There had been a storm and waves in the moonlight were beautiful and frightening. I had never seen the Pacific before. On the way back from the beach we happened upon a eucalyptus tree in full bloom. I was very impressed with the flowers:

Flowers have numerous fluffy stamens which may be white, cream, yellow, pink or red; in bud the stamens are enclosed in a cap known as an operculum which is composed of the fused sepals or petals or both. Thus flowers have no petals, decorating themselves instead with the many showy stamens. As the stamens expand the operculum is forced off, splitting away from the cup-like base of the flower; this is one of the features that unites the genus. The name Eucalyptus, from the Greek words eu-, well, and kaluptos, cover, meaning “well-covered”, describes the operculum. The woody fruits or capsules, known as gumnuts, are roughly cone-shaped and have valves at the end which open to release the seeds.

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My spring break was full of ocean and incredible plants and wonderful botanists.  Details will be posted shortly.  Until then, I’ve got math to do!

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