Our sixth nature journal club meetup was our biggest and (arguably) best yet! Certainly our best lunch spread—we are totally rocking the picnic buffet. Seventeen of us enjoyed perfect winter weather (70° and sunny) at charming Charmlee Wilderness Park in western Malibu. Such a joy.
Castor oil plants are having a field day around here this year — they’re crowding the roadsides and spreading in vacant lots. The plant is invasive, as well as highly toxic, and I’m not happy to see its proliferation in the Santa Monica Mountains.
However, castor oil itself has many medicinal and industrial uses. I remember it from childhood (stories, not direct experience) as a nasty laxative/purgative. Castor oil was used as an instrument of coercion under the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and by the Spanish Civil Guard in Francoist Spain. Dissidents and regime opponents were forced to ingest the oil in large amounts, triggering severe diarrhea and dehydration, which could ultimately cause death.
On the less sinister side, modern uses of natural, blended, or chemically altered castor oil products include:
• A non-freezing, pressure-resistant lubricant
• A raw material for some varieties of biodiesel
• A component of many cosmetics
• An anti-viral, -bacterial or -fungal ingredient in many ointments
• A modifier that improves the flow characteristics of cocoa butter in the manufacture of chocolate bars
• A repellent for moles and voles in lawns
Castor seeds have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 4000 BC; the slow-burning oil was mostly used to fuel lamps. Herodotus and other Greek travellers noted the use of castor seed oil for lighting, body ointments, and improving hair growth and texture. Cleopatra is reputed to have used it to brighten the whites of her eyes.
So there you have it. An extremely useful (and quite pretty) plant — just not one I want growing around here.
Annette noticed that these two cliff-aster-y looking plants were joined by a runner, the way strawberry or spider plants propagate. (A bit of googling led me to the botanical name for this joining structure: it’s called a stolon). I’ve seen a lot of cliff asters and other related Asteraceae but have never observed this growth habit. I don’t have a positive ID on the plant, but I’ll certainly be looking for other examples while I’m out on the trails.
This is going to be my last attendance at Draw With Me for a few months, as I start a life drawing class at this time next week 😁
Getting a little abstract on the birthday cards. Loving this color combo.
Bodie and I are bored with this rain. We ventured forth for a walk during a short dry spell, but we got less than a mile before it started coming down again. Now she’s sulking and I’m reduced to sketching the view from the kitchen window.
I recently met a Bulgarian couple, and we got to discussing Bulgarian literature, as I had just read Georgi Gaspodinov’s Time Shelter. They recommended Kapka Kassabova to me, and I borrowed a couple of her books from the library. From the back cover of this one: “Border is an immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis, and a witchy descent into both interior and exterior geographies.” I’m fifteen pages in, and I think I’m going to like it a lot.
I love it when dinner guests bring flowers 💐, as I rarely buy them for myself.
Rhea sent me a kookaburra audio clip, which reminded me of the time during lockdown that Dr Farvardin Daliri built a huge kookaburra statue complete with soundtrack, and towed it around Brisbane to make people smile. Sound on!
