In the last week I have undertaken a project to identify the volunteer weedlings in my yard that I do not already know. So far I have narrowed down the physalis to physalis viscosa, which took all morning since there are several physalis species with purple spots on the yellow blooms: and identified the pretty lobed thing under the deck as ( Read more... )

One thing you can say about plants is they tend to be pretty optimistic. Stress them, and what do they do? Set seed ( Read more... )

I have to go to the airport, and I am not going anywhere. I have to show the Delta ticket counter my credit card so that they can verufy that it is an actual physical card. This is because I have bought a ticket to go to Accra, where apparently people pull frauds or something. I am not going to Accra. Frank is going to Accra. He will be ( Read more... )

from Botanical Latin, by William T. Stearn, with reference to certain 18th-century descriptive botanists ( Read more... )

So now I know how financial aid for foreign medical schools works, and that's why we're taking out a loan on the house. Just for this year, so far, because we don't want to be paying on the rest of it for longer than we have to. Also because the interest rates on the Stafford loans are not much worse than we can get on the house ( Read more... )

I think my plum and apricot hybridized this year. The apricots and plums were both milder in flavor. The apricots never got to the melt-in-your mouth stage. The plums mostly have a dapply, pluot-looking skin. They're right next to each other. Most years they overlap in bloom time, but this year they overlapped a lot more. I keep hurting my head ( Read more... )

Is this happening elsewhere, or only in California? When I look at plants in the nursery, tall cut-flower and bedding plants have all been bred to have thick, coarse, short stems and oversized, coarse flowers. It's difficult to find flower and bedding plants with the graceful stems and just-right sized flowers I'm accustomed to ( Read more... )

( flower neepery and big picture )

Okay, before anything else: Floridian landscape plants.

Aren't they wonderful? Don't they make you just an eentsy bit curious about living in the tropics? These are so -- dang, I can't say exotic, can I? That's just redundant. Anyway, I especially liked the part about planting for hurricanes. Also, trees called "stoppers" because their bark ( Read more... )

Degeneriaceae

What a great name for a family of plants.


( Read more... )