Weekend Walkabout: Tuberose, Sunflower, Ceramics!

My single flower, Mexican Tuberoses are blooming, so exciting! And very, very fragrant....

There are more green facets to fresh tuberose than  you can ever smell in tuberose absolutes or attars. I will have to try an enfleurage someday, because I cannot hope to waft actual tuberose blossom in any commercial perfume I can think of. So I say, just grow some tuberoses if you can.

This year, the aphids are not so bad but the spider mites are taking over my world. Despite that, I have some lovely sunflowers....

Though technically, we are getting normal rains, and are not in drought, we are having problems. Our rains come down in "walls of water". We had about 2 inches in an hour, then nothing for weeks. This is not easy for plants to deal with. So our inches per month are pretty normal, but our rains are freakin' weird.... I water everything in my vicinity every morning, but I have to wake up pretty early to get it done.

My herbalism class is going well. I've been making a few smudge pots and drying trays....

And strange things keep washing up on our beach...here's a ball.

Volleyball? Hard to say where it came from, but I'll bet the Bahamas, where they are severely trash-challenged. Note the barnacles? All in all, though, our beaches were pretty clean and lovely this week.
Have a wonderful weekend walkabout!

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....