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makeover
Ma’s patio decor was in dire need of a refresh. She had some nice colourful ceramic pots, but all the plants were dead and the plastic watering can had perished in the sun. So I showed up with potting soil and a bunch of new plants and gave the place a makeover. She was thrilled!
berry interesting
I think I already knew that tomatoes were berries. But avocados? Apparently so!
In botany, a berry is a fleshy fruit produced from a single flower containing one ovary. Under that definition, bananas, cucumbers, and eggplants are also berries.
But many of the fruit we commonly called berries, e.g. raspberries and blackberries, are not. They are aggregate or compound fruits containing seeds from different ovaries of a single flower, with the individual “fruitlets” joined at maturity to form the complete fruit.
Berrrrrrrry interesting.
Libbey Park fountain
you’re so vein
I just bought this cool book, Let’s Botanize by Ben Goulet-Scott and Jacob S. Suissa. 101 Ways to Connect with Plants? Yes please! The very first prompt has me jonesing for a microscope.
In working on this page, I learned the botanist’s terms for the upper- and under-side of a leaf. Adaxial and abaxial. How to remember which is which? Abaxial includes B for Bottom.
Scudderia mexicana
Ficus carica
I was reading up on the fig leaf in Western culture, and came across a funny story:
The V&A Museum in London holds a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David. When Queen Victoria first saw the replica, she was reportedly so horrified by its nudity that a proportionally sized fig leaf was commissioned to cover the statue’s genitals. The leaf was kept on hand for royal visits and attached to the figure with two discreet hooks 😂.
Chrysoperla
I was wandering around the yard with my sketchbook, looking for some inspiration, when a little bug landed on my page. Yay! Lacewings are highly beneficial to gardeners and farmers because of their voracious appetite for small soft-bodied plant pests like aphids and small caterpillars.
Feijoa
Huh. I always thought the feijoa was a native of New Zealand, but though it’s been widely grown there for 100 years, it’s actually native to the highlands of Colombia, southern Brazil and the hills of northeast Uruguay. It can also be found in eastern Paraguay and northern Argentina.
We planted some at Malibu, and they never really thrived (and then they burned in the fire). But there’s some very healthy specimens at King Gillette Ranch, in full flower right now. So pretty.
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