Pensive Tuesday: A Global Cease-Fire?

When I read the news these days, I want to turn off the computer and spend more time with my plants in the garden. Do you? I am tired of reading about the Daily Carnage our species is engaged in…but how to counteract the violent chaos?

Personally, I would love to see all seven-and-a-quarter-billion of us agree to a 24-hour period of No Killing. We could choose any day of the year. Maybe an ordinary Monday. Mondays need a little love. We could exempt the 0-3 year-old crowd, I guess, but the rest of us could pledge that for just that one day, we would not kill each other. Could we actually do that? Choose a day to Not Kill? And if we did, what would happen?

On its own, one day doesn’t seem very significant. But I think, if we could pull it off, it would show us that it is possible to live peacefully. At least for a little while, one day at a time. That is not as hard as we think it is. 

 Success for just one day could give us the confidence to continue. One day could become three days. Three days could become a week. And then, perhaps, if we got that far, the impossible dream of no killing for a year wouldn’t seem like such a crazy fantasy anymore.  

Stranger things have happened in this world….

Photo by Riccardo Senettin, Italy, June 2014

Pensive Tuesday: My Vanity Protea

About 6 months ago, I bought some Protea seeds, thinking I might try to grow them on my sand dune. The time to plant them is autumn, so I'm ready to roll. I really love these flowers and, though my chances of successfully growing a Protea to adulthood are slim, I'm willing to give it a go.

Proteas grow mainly in South Africa and are known there as "sugarbushes". They were named after Proteus, the ancient Greek shapeshifter god, because there are so many varied types. They are a bit like Euphorbias in that sense. Proteas are a particularly ancient flower; their ancestors flourished in the southern supercontinent of Gondwana, 300 million years ago.

Protea neriifolia from Wikimedia

The seeds need a pre-sowing treatment with a Smoke Germination Stimulant. You can see this clever device in the lower left corner of my instruction sheet. So why am I calling this my "Vanity Protea"? Well, Proteas are threatened in their native habitat. According to National Geographic in 2010:
"The Cape floristic region was given international recognition as South Africa's sixth UN World Heritage site in June last year. More than 9,000 plant species make up the region, 6,000 of which are found nowhere else on Earth." Ironically, I am attempting to grow a Protea far from its native land at the same time the latest IPCC report is published. Our climate is undergoing drastic change, much of the change is human-induced, and many unique botanical treasures will be leaving us in the coming decades. Will my New World Protea thrive here? Is it a waste of time to grow them ex situ? Would it be better to spend my money on something that will directly curtail climate change where Proteas grow naturally? Should I spend my time lobbying instead of gardening? I don't know. But it's sure got me pensive....

 

 

Pensive Tuesday: Life Seen Through a Broken Lens

This is the second broken camera I've become rather enchanted with. The first was an ancient film camera (old when I bought it in a second hand store in Europe), a Nikon FM.  It had been toted all over the planet in some rather deplorable conditions, and I'm embarrassed to have done what I did to that poor gadget. Eventually, the film stopped spooling properly, sprockets would show up on the negatives, the light bled in weird ways. But I kept using it because I never knew what it would do next. I'm still working with some of the negatives, they are ghostly and strange. Here's a fairly normal looking shot from Italy:

Now my first digital camera has gone the way of all gadgets, another victim of entropy. I haven't decided which model will be my new camera, and I really wanted to photograph my Russian sunflowers. They don't last long, and they are extraordinary. So out came the broken camera with the screwed up lens:

And you know, I really like this shot. This one, too:

I'm keeping the kaput camera, and will probably use it now and then, even after I've got the new one. Who knows what will turn up?


The lens is a mess, but then, if my own lenses were perfect, and I saw life clearly, with perfect equilibrium and peace, I probably wouldn't still be here. Ditto for everyone else. We've all got lens issues, don't we? But sometimes, that's a good thing, and we see things a little differently now and then.

Pensive Tuesday: Are Tillandsias the Future?

I was very surprised to learn that the genus Tillandsia evolved in the Andean region at the beginning of the Tertiary Period (about 65million to 2ish million years ago). They are late-comers to Earth's plant party, and very highly evolved. They've mostly given up on roots (and therefore, dirt), and ditched stomata for trichomes. They can live in some of the most difficult environments on the planet, from the tropics to the high deserts, from sea-level to some of the highest mountains. But might they become an important part of the human world?

A Tangle of Tillandsia

Many human habitations suffer from bad air. Low oxygen, high smog. A real mess. Plants have been used for centuries to clean and oxygenate the air in houses, but there's always that  problem of...dirt, which most of us don't like to have in the house. I mean, it's messy! But Tillandsias gave up dirt a long time ago, which brings me to....

Tillies are tidy.

Symbiosis! Many species have evolved to live in mutual benefit with other species. Cows and rabbits have symbiotic bacterial colonies that break down tough cellulose in exchange for vitamins, sugars, and so on.

Got symbionts?

They can't live without the bacteria, the bacteria can't live without them. I see a potential for mutualism with Tillandsias in our future. Bring those Tillies to your home, get oxygen and clean air in exchange. And for the plants, they get a safe home and good care at a time when many of them are going extinct in the wild. Seems like a good deal in the making for plants and people....

The ever-adaptable Tillandsia usneoides, Spanish Moss!

Some clever folk in Asia are already using T. usneoides as living curtains in their apartments. I'm sure the inhabitants of crowded, smoggy cities would appreciate some living Tillie curtains. And why not suspended from the walls or ceiling? In a "Florida Room"  (a semi-outdoor, semi-indoor room that can get pretty wet, and drains easily), watering could be done with sprayers. I'm not sure how watering could be done for a Tillie ceiling in a traditional bedroom, but there are lots of clever designers and engineers out there who could devise some way of managing it.

Tillandsia intermedia, on a Tillie Tower.

Has anyone out there tried living with Tillies? How did it work out? The furthest I've gone is keeping about 5 dozen Tillies in the living room, suspended on wire CD racks, which I call the Tillie Towers. It's made the room much fresher and greener than before (and a little weirder, too). How might you incorporate Tillandsias into your home??

Pensive Tuesday: Keeping Our Knowledge

An ironic title for a post on a blog during the Era of the Internet, a time of "knowledge explosion", a time when we can't keep up with our knowledge, when we don't even know what we know, because there's just too much information out there!

"Optuntia"- MR 2012

I'm actually going to discuss person-to-person knowledge transfer, or how we learn things the old fashioned way. We used to learn something particularly well because a real-life person, often a family member, librarian, or teacher, taught us that something. When I was a child, the mighty Google hadn't been born yet. If I wanted to find something out, I had to ask someone, or go to my local library. I enjoy the convenience and abundance of online data, and would have a hard time going back to the old days. But I worry that in the crush of online data, we've lost knowledge that used to be gleaned the old way.  Learning how to take care of plants is something that is best done by person-to-person knowledge transfer, and I had an example of this truth this weekend at our local orchid show.

I am no longer a nimble youth, but I was the youngest one at the show!  Most of the people who were visiting, or displaying their orchids, were in their 70s and up. There were no kids. The only exceptions were the families from Taiwan and the Philippines who were there to sell their orchids. They were mostly extended families, with children in tow who were learning the family business. I bought a beautiful Catasetum from a Taiwanese gardener. She said she'd learned all about orchids starting at age 5 from her grandfather, and her parents. Orhid-growing was her family's business for many generations. She's now teaching her own children how to tend orchids.

I went online when I got home (of course I did!), and found out my country's orchid society has shrunk from 33,000 members 10 years ago to about 11,000 today. They lost their home and gardens in Delray Beach, Florida, because there weren't enough members to keep it going.

Frankly, I'm worried. If we're not passing our knowledge of horticulture on to our kids, and other young people, how will that knowledge be kept? I don't like the idea that the only place out there to learn gardening is a highly vulnerable virtual world, the Internet. Especially in this time of rapid climate change, when many native habitats (and their inhabitants) are disappearing, it's even more important that we learn to cultivate all sorts of plants in our own gardens. Then we can personally pass that knowledge on to others.

I'm going to make an effort to get out with my Tillandsias and Mesembs more often to speak to groups of kids and young people. What do you all think?? Am I just being old-fashioned?? Or are you pensive, too?

"Ulm Cathedral"- MR

Pensive Tuesday: Expanding the Circle of Sentience



Wild lantana MR 2013


If you have access to this video, it's well worth watching for all plant lovers:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/what-plants-talk-about/video-full-episode/8243/

Professor J.C. Cahill of University of Alberta has been researching the behavior of plants in some very novel and fascinating ways. Gardeners have long suspected, or known of, the sentience of plants pretty much forever, but science has been way behind in understanding the unique consciousness of our green friends. There's some great photography in the show as well, and even if you can't see the video, it's fun to read the comments of fellow plant-lovers who've seen the show.

For too long, humans have defined such things as intelligence, feelings, consciousness, and sentience in purely human, or at least simian, terms. I think we're finally learning that this approach is inadequate and denies us appreciation and knowledge of the lives of other species, particularly those that are structured in a radically different way from our own. It's nice to know that we're getting the idea that you don't have to have opposable thumbs to join the Sentience Club!



'Sentience" MR 2013



Pensive Tuesday: Gardener's Pratitya-samutpada

A long and difficult-to-pronounce word that means something simple for gardeners: causes and conditions.  It's a Sanskrit word for "dependent arising", which means that nothing happens without something else causing it, and if conditions aren't correct, that thing won't happen no matter how hard you try to Make it So. That's my view of it, anyway.

In gardening, I think about this principle a lot in the spring. The old annuals are getting tossed into the compost heap, and new plants are planted. The old mulch is out, the new mulch and compost are going in. Eventually, the old garden becomes the dirt, and the dirt becomes the new garden.

And of course, the best part of spring, when causes and conditions come together in the most beautiful way, is flowers!

Babytoes: "I don't care about causes and conditions: I just like to BLOOM!"

For me, spring's the time to contemplate what worked and what didn't, which plants had the correct conditions, and which did not. And of course, for causes and conditions to come together to form a beautiful garden for the year, there's a lot of hard work. But it's my favorite time of the gardening year, so I'm enjoying my ruminations, and the mulching.

"Causes and Conditions" /MR/2010

When all the bits and pieces and effort come together to make a beautiful new pattern, I know I've done my job well.
And when it all falls apart, I know there's more gardening, and more learning, down the road.

Pensive Tuesday: Why Tillandsias?

Tillandsias have been increasing in popularity. Why? Well, I know a few reasons why I love them....

A Table Full of Tillies

They are portable. They can grow anywhere. Time ago, people used to be born in one place, live in one place, and die in one place. These days, good luck with that.  Tillies don't need their native earth to grow. Just some water and sun, anywhere on planet Earth, and they're good to go. No roots required.

They can grow on practically anything. Mine are growing very well on an old CD rack. What have you got? I'll bet there's something in  your garage or attic that would make your Tillies happy.

Garden Spirit, MR, 2013

Tillies are tough. They can grow almost anywhere. They can grow on almost anything. They just need a little sunshine and water and they are good to go. What plants for our age! Why do you love your Tillies??

Pensive Tuesday: Re-evaluation and Growth

Alright, so I've decided to just accept it. Summer 2012 gave Autumn and Winter a miss, and moved right into Spring 2013. Generally, I re-evaluate, re-pot, re-mulch, and re-design the garden in April. But now I'm doing it in February, because February has become April, weather-wise...even the sunrises are springy now.

Spring Sunrise in February, MR 2013

Some of my plants are screaming for re-potting. Babytoes II, especially, who has completely outgrown her little stoneware pot.

"Need new pot, NOW!"

Quite a few of the re-leafing Lithops are going to need new digs soon, too....

"Yikes, it's getting close in here!"

And even some of the lantanas and vincas for the winter's school science project on botany are begging to be planted in the garden--they are practically done blooming already, and it's not even Valentine's Day yet! They have one more week left in the science project, then into the garden they will go.

"Science, schmience, replant us NOW!"

Sometimes you just have to throw your calendar away and get with the beat! Off I go to buy some mulch. Should it be red or gold this year??

Pensive Tuesday: Time Goes FAST

I remember when the mother of a good friend of mine, then in her 40s, explained to my naive teenaged self--
"Time is perceived as much faster when you are 50 than when you are 5 because when you are 5, one year is 1/5 of your life. When you are 50, one year is 1/50 of your life. It's such a tiny fraction!" She was my Yoda in those days....

So now that I'm no longer in the 1/5 category, I'm realizing that time indeed goes faster for me than for children, or bunnies, or cats, or any sentient being that has been around for less than a half century or so. No wonder I feel the pressure of a world that seems increasingly designed by and for 20-somethings! No offense to the 20-somethings, it's just mathematics.  My lists are longer, my time "seems" shorter than it does to you....

All the better to ground myself (sorry, another pun) in the natural cycles of the plant world....

 Blooming Tillies, for example. They have their own calendar, they don't care about mine....

And blooming Babytoes, they're just happy to be here. They sure love the sunshine and the beach!

So I say to myself, take a look in the mirror, take a slow breath, let my thoughts float away like clouds. I think that may be the secret of the Everblooming Babytoes! I'll let you know....
Happy Tuesday.

Pensive Tuesday: Under Pressure

I don't know about you all, but my calendar for the next two months is just stuffed! And most of it with "Things I Have To Do", not "Things I Want To Do".  My "Must Do ASAP" list for 2013, at least for these first few months, is so long it's giving me nightmares. I'm following a new health plan to be more fit and, well, healthy. One of the main rules is "Stop Stressing".  Yeah, right.... A lobotomy might help with that!

In the midst of all this frenetic activity and stress, how do my 100+ plants fit in? Well, it's actually very nice to have living things waiting for my attention. It means I have to stop what I'm doing, curb the stressing, and spend some time with the chlorophyllian creatures. Or they'll die. That's a pretty strong incentive to slow it down and get with the watering program. And once I do take a little time, and a few breaths, I realize that life is also about appreciating beautiful, cheerful moments. Like a blooming Babytoes! (Yes, it bloomed again.)

Do plants and pets help curb your stress and force you to breathe once in a while??

Pensive Tuesday: The Arctic is Messing With My Lithops

And it's partly my fault....You see, we're having the strangest winter here. It's about 10C warmer than it usually is, and should be, in January. We're getting plenty of fog and a little rain, and it's supposedly the "dry season". Our wet season is summer, when it's hot hot hot. Our dry season is winter, when it's cool and arid. That's the subtropics. That WAS the subtropics.  As we force-feed warming gases to our atmosphere, we start meltin' things. Right now, we're melting the Arctic most of all. I've been up there, and I can tell you, it's getting weird up there.

Arctic Hare, Feeling Weird (MR 2011)

Bizarre, contorted loops in the jet stream are to blame for the unreasonable cold in parts of the world that should be warmer, and the summery warmth here. The Wunderblog has a post on it today:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html
Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in the US thinks that the melting Arctic fuels these bizarre jet stream loops. As they get warmer at the North Pole, we get loopier down here.... So I'm running on the beach without a jacket in January....

And flowers that shouldn't even be in bud yet are nearly finished for the spring!

My Lithops really don't know what to think, and are going dormant, blooming, and showing their new leaf pairs, all at once. Awkward. Even the incredibly tough and resilient Mother of Millions is blooming early.

What a mess! Are the plants in your part of the world a bit out of sync, also??

Pensive Tuesday: Calling In Sick

These past few weeks have been a real learning opportunity. What am I learning about? Influenza B! We're having a true epidemic here. I haven't been this sick for about 5 years. Yuck. And once the flu is over, there's this 2-week long thing called "Post Influenza Fatigue and Malaise".

I am fatigued and malaised.... I need to take more medicine.

Since my brain is operating on the level of a beached jellyfish, I only have practical, immediate thoughts for Pensive Tuesday. Like...who's going to take care of my 100+ plants until I can get out of bed?

Do you have a plantsitter? Do you have several?

3 Men and a Bunch of Lithops??? I called Tom Selleck, but he was sadly unavailable....

I really do need to get a couple of people trained to take care of these unusual plants. I make candy, so I will bribe them with it.

Mind you, Lithops and other mesembs, and Tillies, can do a Cam Idle and be left pretty much to themselves for at least a week or two. But sometimes, we get called away for longer periods. I really do need to train a couple of plantsitters.... What do you do for plant-sitting?

Pensive Tuesday: Who Doesn't Fit In??

Sometimes, I have to take a look at my growing collection and think, who's not fitting in here??

Not that any of my plants are in any way disagreeable to me, not at all! It's just that some seem to need to be...somewhere else. That's what my outdoor cacti/succulent garden is for. That's what friends are for. For some plants, like the Mother of Millions, that's what other planets are for!

Happy Somewhere Else....

How do I define if a plant isn't doing well with the others? Well, of course, if it's ailing, I try to figure out where it would be happier. Often, that's outside. Sansevierias, for example, do better outdoors. They even bloom out there, which they pretty much never do inside a house.

For some, I just have too many. Kalanchoes grow so quickly, and every leaf can be the start of a whole new colony. That's what friends are for, right? That's what holiday gifts are for! I think everyone I know has at least one baby Panda Plant from my garden....

How do you manage your collection so that your house doesn't become a full-time greenhouse? Or are you busy knocking holes in your walls so you'll have more windows and windowsills for your plants??

Pensive Tuesday: How Far Would You Go...

For your collection??? For that rare plant, the new cultivar that looks so amazing?

If you couldn't find what you wanted, would you grow them from seed?

 Or engineer them in a lab so that they glow in the dark??

 

Would you collect it in the wild? How far would you go to get it? What risks would you take?

As for me, I'm willing to go about 50 miles or so to a specialist's nursery, or order on the Internet, but I don't collect wild plants. I'll try growing them from seed if I can't find any locally. But that is not always successful! I tried growing Argyrodermas from seed, both in soil mix, and in wet paper towels. The seeds came all the way from S. Africa, but I grew nothing. My Lithops seedlings, on the other hand, seem OK

I've read fascinating stories about botanists going through real Indiana Jones adventures in the Karoo and Argentina, looking for rare succulents and epiphytes. I'm not willing to go quite that far...but how about you??

Pensive Tuesday: Armchair Travel Through Gardening

I'm probably like most people in that I have a list of places I want to visit, but probably never will. I am very fortunate in that I've been able to travel to many countries and places in my life, but hey, there are always more! This is not a phase of my life when travel is likely, however. Which is OK, because I can be in those places, a little, through my garden....



Photo: Mimmo Jodice, "Mediterranean"

I can't at this moment visit Greece or return to the Mediterranean, but I can grow many of the plants that I love from that region. Immortelle, lavender, and rosemary, for example. So I can smell the plants of Mediterranean Italy or France, even if I'm not actually standing there.

I've always wanted to visit the Karoo, and many other places in South Africa, and to see Proteas growing wild. That trip is a ways in the future, but until then, I can grow many of the plants from the Karoo, and that makes me happy. Sadly, Proteas are not possible for me here but I'm working on it!

I miss the US Southwestern desert of my youth, but I am reminded of it every day when I see my "Amigos"- the cacti from that part of the world. By growing these cacti, a little bit of my favorite place on Earth lives with me right here and now.
So "garden-bench traveling" is my mode these days. Do any of you travel via your gardens??

Pensive Tuesday: What Goes Around, Comes Around

I attended the International Sea-bean Symposium this weekend in Central Florida. It was so crowded, I couldn't even find a seat at several lectures! For those who don't live near a beach, sea-beans are wanderers of the sea, a type of flotsam that can eventually grow on a far shore. In our area, they are mostly seed pods and plant bits from the Caribbean and South America, which come up to us via the Gulf Stream. It's a fun hobby to collect them, and a very popular hobby, too, it would seem.  In addition to talks on sea-beans, there were several lectures on flotsametrics, the science of where flotsam starts, and where it lands, and what that reveals about our changing seas and currents.



Some sea-beans

I attended a lecture on what is happening to the flotsam from the horrific Japanese tsunami of March 11, 2011. A sentinel patch has come ashore on the West Coast of North America already, but the biggest part of the mess, about 2000 miles by 1000 miles in size, is about 500 miles offshore, and should be hitting us very soon. Most of it is styrofoam, yuck.  But there are also personal items, such as a basketball from a middle school that was destroyed. It came ashore in Washington State, and the girl who found it is going to Japan soon to return it to the school, which is being rebuilt. I was really touched by that. Fed Ex pilots are flying many personal possessions back to Japan to reunite the items with their owners. Sadly, many of the owners are dead or missing. But there have been some amazing successes. People can be wonderful.

The strangest part of the talk was the revelation that about 10% of the flotsam will be arriving on Atlantic shores. That's right, the Atlantic. Wrong ocean, right? But now that the Arctic has melted to such an extent, whatever floats from the Pacific Ocean into the Arctic Ocean eventually comes out the Atlantic Ocean. It travels, after a long while, via the Gulf Stream and is deposited on our beaches. Unbelievable. So Japanese tsunami flotsam should be arriving here about 2015 or thereabouts. Most of it will be styrofoam. But not all.

So my pensive thought from all this is that we really have just one big ocean, and just one long beach. What comes around goes around, and what goes around comes around.

This the left sole of a child's shoe, mineralized by its many years in the ocean. I found it about a month ago, along with about a dozen other shoes, all for the left foot. Go figure.... 

Pensive Tuesday: A Plea for Data

Autumn has arrived on our dunes, and though it's still scorching hot, gardening season has begun! That means plants are once again appearing in the nurseries, including some lovely new Tillandsias and (drumroll) Lithops. A wonderful non-chain nursery, Rockledge Gardens, occasionally gets a shipment of Lithops, and I found four new ones this weekend.

That's the good news. Here's the bad:

Look at that label. Here's a closeup--

Gack. Now these Lithops were all in pretty good shape, in very suitable soil, and had been watered only sparingly. So the nursery where they grew up had obviously done good work. So why not add a real label?  It would not take much time or effort to put the genus and species on the sticky label. Now I'm stuck (again) trying to figure out which species I've got here. There are no live experts on the subject in my area, and pictures on the Web can be accurate, or misleading.  And let's face it, a lot of Lithops species look like...a lot of other Lithops species! I can't keep pestering my readers who are more expert by far than I am, hoping for an ID. So I make a plea to nurseries everywhere to give us the data!

But what is this little guy?? I'm thinking lesliei, but it could, just maybe, be an aucampiae. I'll figure it out eventually.

In this Age of Google, there's really a need for more data from the nurseries. Some do better than others in terms of giving us the goods on our purchases. But here's what I want:

1. Genus and species
2. Origin of the plant (ancestrally, and the individual, that's a big CITES deal for some of these)
3. Specific care instructions. (If instructions are included, they're usually something like, "Full sun and regular water." Your basic Lithops Death Sentence....)


Now of course, the nursery owner wouldn't have to put every little detail on the sticky label. There could just be a URL/QR code that would point nerds like me to a website with the relevant data. But genus and species are a must. And lots of people are curious, not just obsessive nerds like me. Every time I've bought a Lithops I've spent maybe 15 minutes answering other customers' questions about them. People get fascinated. At one local nursery, I've actually been nicknamed, "The Lithops Lady"!  So there's really a hunger for good info out there. People don't want to kill these little guys. And a label that says, "Living Stone" is not enough.


How do your nurseries do in terms of giving you the data?? What would your ideal be??