Resurrection: My Butia and its Near Death Experience
Last summer was a sit, wait and worry, summer. The previous winter of ‘16-‘17 was a hard one here. Because my Butia capitata had been sailing through its previous nine winters, in this location,...
View ArticleAnisodontea capensis ‘El Rayo’: A Closer Look at Jimi’s Beautiful Obsession...
Another Choice Plant From Jimi Blake’s NPA Seattle Study Weekend Presentation ‘El Rayo’, in english is, ‘Lightning’! One should expect something pretty spectacular, flashy even, with this plant…or...
View ArticleMusa sikkimensis ‘Red Tiger’ (Bengal Tiger) and the Banana Story: Evolution...
Another Jimi Blake plant. I have history with this choice of Jimi’s…and the NW has a history with Bananas as well! There’s an old hand colored postcard floating around the Washington Park office of...
View ArticleWinter 0f ’18 -’19: Cloudy, Mild With a Chance of….On Weather, Zones & Plants
It’s 41ºF at 5:30am on Mar. 12 as I begin to write this. We appear to have come out of the longest sustained ‘cold’ period of the winter of ’18-’19 which began on February 4 and continued through Mar....
View ArticlePuya: Growing These Well Armed South Americans in the Pacific Northwest
[I wrote this originally about 2 years ago as part of what turned out to be a too long look into the Bromeliad Family. Here I present only the genus Puya spp. in an edited form with the addition of...
View ArticleOn Ecology, Politics and Climate Change: the Links that Tear us Asunder
Warning!!! This is a rant! It’s political, economic, ecological and, most definitely, covers all of the connections between with climate change, these things and our future as a species. I hope you...
View ArticleLife Inside the Cell – Waking Up to the Miracle, part 1a
[This is the first in an extended series of three posts, this one on life within the cell, the second, on the evolution of plants, and the third on the New Phylogeny and Eudicots. Some time ago I...
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Agave colorata and its Blooming Attempt in ’18
Agave colorata before flowering initiation, growing nearly horizontal, with a broadly cupped lower leaf holding water. From the Irish’s book, “Agaves, Yuccas and Related Plants”, “The leaves are 5-7″...
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Agave montana: Monte’s Flowering Attempt…and What’s Behind It
It’s October in Portland and my Agave montana is in the process of flowering…I know, we’re heading toward winter, with its rain and average low down into the mid-30’s with potentially sudden damaging...
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Passing the ‘Baton’: On Life, Seeds, Germination and Vegetative Propagation
This diagram is of a typical bean seed here to illustrate some of the basic structures within all seeds. When germination begins water is taken in via the Micropyle. This picture is taken from a simple...
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Latitude and Energy: A Beginning Point
45º! In my previous post I suggest, for reasons of solar gain and intensity, that we gardeners might have better luck choosing plants for our gardens if we chose them from our own latitude, north and...
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What is Life, Biology and the Non-equilibrium State: The Quantum World of the...
Sometimes art does a better job of conveying ‘reality’ than does our direct experience as it forces us to look through the eyes of others. The swirling, blurred edges of Van Gogh’s work begins to show...
View ArticleCOVID-19, Pandemics and How They Will Change the World For the Better
I’m not a biological ‘fatalist’, but there are several reasons why epidemiologists were attempting to plan for a pandemic and why the Obama administration was empowering institutions, creating...
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What Do We Do When the Whole World Feels Like its Falling to Pieces?
In this blog I focus on plants. Any gardener, botanist or horticulturist knows that plants, all living organisms, live in an incredibly complex, interwoven network of systems, each affecting the...
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The Flowering of Monte: Going ‘Viral’ During a Pandemic
When will it actually flower? Once people got passed the, ‘What is ‘that’ question?’, this is what they wanted to know. When would it actually flower? by which they meant the individual petalous...
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Nature as a Model For Society and the Economy
For years now my real interest has been in plants and the life sciences. This has lead me to better understand the physics and chemistry of life, of the organism, as I attempt to understand the truly...
View ArticleWhy Bad Things Happen to Good Plants?: On Root Problems, Root Washing,...
“To be, or not to be? That is the question—Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end...
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Physics, Evolution, Natural Selection and the Generative Power of the of Far...
On Darwin and His Theory Evolution is a word that can divide the world. Its opponents often claim that all that lives today, in terms of species diversity, did so yesterday…all the way back to the...
View ArticlePhysics, Evolution, Natural Selection and the Generative Power of Far Out of...
If you are relatively unfamiliar with the ideas included within quantum mechanics, physics, this is an excellent place to begin. It is a good, concise, review for those whose grasp of the topic is...
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On the Chaotic Unreality of the Real and How We Redefine It: Reimagining...
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Grand Odalisque. Ingres was a Neo-Classicist, who attempted to create images that mimicked ‘reality’ even as it distorted it for effect, lengthening her spine and...
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