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.
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 😂.
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.
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.
I used to own a shirt covered in green beetles with black spots. Here’s me wearing it back in 2017 (aside: this was taken at our old place, that burned down in the Palisades Fire of 2025. Gah I miss it.) One day someone at work told me that my shirt beetles were Diabrotica, a major agricultural pest. It stuck in my head, because I thought “Diabolical Diabrotica”.
These guys cause damage to crops in the larval and adult stages of their life cycle. Larvae feed on the roots of the emerging plants, and the adult beetles eat the flowers, leaves, stems, and fruits of over fifty different types of crops and wild plants, including corn, peanuts, beans, apples, cherries, clovers, lettuce, potatoes and, yes, cucumbers. The beetles can also spread diseases such as bacterial wilt and mosaic virus.
Who eats them? Wolf spiders!
It’s been a while since I hiked one of my favourite trails in MCSP, Piuma Ridge. There are lots of wildflowers hanging on.
hashiworks 