Finally got around to the Day 7 prompt from International Nature Journaling Week: renewal and regeneration.
Wispy clouds today. It’s been May Grey/June Gloom for so long, it’s lovely to see blue sky.
Week 23 in the Perpetual Journal. The prickly pear’s putting on a show!
When inspiration deserts, you can always paint your lunch.
Lavender and oregano are both in the same family, Lamiaceae, along with about 7500 other species. This family of flowering plants is commonly known as the mint, deadnettle, or sage family. Many of the plants are aromatic in all parts and include widely used culinary herbs like basil, mint, rosemary, sage, savory, marjoram, and thyme, as well as other medicinal herbs such as catnip, salvia, bee balm, wild dagga, and oriental motherwort.
How many members of this family are growing in your garden?
Flax, also known as common flax or linseed, has been cultivated as a food and fiber crop in temperate climates for over 9,000 years.
Linen is made from this plant’s fibrous stems, and the seed’s oil is known as linseed oil. Humans first domesticated flax in the Fertile Crescent region. Use of the crop steadily spread, reaching as far as Switzerland and Germany, China and India, where it was cultivated at least 5,000 years ago. It was grown extensively in ancient Egypt, where the temple walls had paintings of flowering flax, and mummies were embalmed using linen.
The seeds and their oil are highly nutritious, and the oil also has industrial uses. It is often blended with combinations of other oils, resins or solvents as a drying oil finish or varnish in wood finishing, as a pigment binder in oil paints, as a plasticizer and hardener in putty, and in the manufacture of linoleum.
A most useful plant indeed. And pretty!
Lovely SMMNJC meetup yesterday at Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa. Between us we saw four different rattlesnakes and a gopher snake (along with lots of other interesting critters).
We did it! All 67 miles of the Backbone Trail were traversed; we actually added 8 miles to the total with our couple of detours. It’s been such a great experience, seeing new parts of the gorgeous Santa Monica Mountains and revisiting favourite sections. Check the ‘backbone trail’ tag to see all the journal entries.
Big thanks to my BHBF (Best Hiking Buddy Forever) for sharing the adventure.
hashiworks 