Hundreds and perhaps thousands of unidentified plant photos lurk in my hard drive. I've always intended to manage and catalog them, maybe make blogging an excuse to learn the botany world one species at a time. I daresay I've failed and should try harder. One of my earliest photos back in March 2012 includes this … Continue reading Stigma Stigma: Misadventure in Identifying Plants
Lake Fort Smith is one of the more popular hiking and boating destinations in my area. There the Ozark Highlands Trail, a 218 mile chain of interconnected trails and collectively the second longest in the state (the Ouachita Trail being the longest at 223 miles). They must be growing, because before I checked I could … Continue reading Views of Lake Fort Smith (Part I: Civilian)
Mycorrhizal fungi grow in and around plant roots as well as provide a nutrient-exchanging path for different individual plants. Occasionally I'll see some meme or link to a brief YouTube video about these fungi, not that one would recognize the term "mycorrhizal" because it is never used. It's danced around. Sometimes substituted with something in … Continue reading Trending: Mycorrhizae Without Writing “Mycorrhizae”
Supposedly in the United States people consume some 80 billion servings of tea. Depending on the age demographic, an estimated 80-87% of the population regularly have it. On a given day half of those people will have a cup. The country is the world's third largest tea importer and the only Western nation to continually … Continue reading Getting the Facts Straight on Tea: From a Non-Tea Drinker
Honey bees get most of the press as far as pollinators are concerned. Sometimes butterflies and bats receive honorary mention. Usually only in certain circles do non-honey bees, essentially all bees save for the European brand that we raise in apiculture, take the stage. Yucca moths not so much. From a botanical and evolutionary standpoint, … Continue reading Yucca Pollination: a Story of a Synchronized Relationship
May was a good month to flip open some identification books, open tabs on identification websites, and start labeling organisms. Some were easy to the species, some I was lucky to have evidence to assign by genus or even subfamily. Some I've seen throughout much of my life and everyone seems to know the common … Continue reading #Project365: May Wild Life
While I've addressed how my undergraduate program has converted many potential non-plant biologists into plant biologists, often I hear about how many universities do not support botany programs. I've experienced this personally, though at the time I was interested in the wildlife biology program. Colorado State University's college of natural sciences posted above the botany … Continue reading Future of Botany and Herbaria
I found out about it too late. It was late in the evening of May 18th, and I saw an Annals of Botany Facebook post from the Oxford University Press blog about Fascinating of Plants Day. Many others knew about it, as #FoPD yielded a plethora of tweets. I’ll be more prepared for it … Continue reading Fascination of Plants Day
Another month of Project365 has gone by, and a little too easily. By that I mean I find more subjects for photos than there are days to take them and time passes swiftly, but I have been putting more time into editing. This is a good thing, as I used to not bother with more than a … Continue reading #Project365: April
My backyard is a jungle. A Vinca minor and Vinca major jungle. All these periwinkles create a pedestrian hazard where if you shuffle your feet just slightly you will likely lodge your toe under the grounded vines and potentially fall on a prickly rose vine, because I have those too—though “vine” may be a misnomer … Continue reading The Value of the Earth
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