The Catch-All Botany Thread

[KichigaiNeko]

SANITY!! In a forum full of this JLY poe!!

Mushrooms...YUM!!!

[thesummerqueen]

Botany catch of the day, passed on to me by a delectable Jewish atheist boy I've recently met, who happens to live in the same area as my parents. You just want to pinch his cheeks.

Anyway, plant talk. So I'm surprised I never knew about this because my dad was always the kind to make us go apple-picking and could find a wild pear tree growing out in the middle of nowhere. We certainly hiked around the Potomac enough as kids. Either way, it's pretty cool, and Jew-boy is supposed to go looking for them this weekend. As someone on his Google+ thread said, "It looks like a green monster's nut sack, lol"


Behold, the PawPaw

http://wamu.org/programs/morning_edition...tten_fruit



http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/cropf...awpaw.html

Eaten in-hand as fresh fruit or processed into desserts. Twigs are source of annonaceous acetogenins which are being used in the development of anti-cancer drugs and botanical pesticides.

[The Grand Nudger]

People are looking into serious commercial production of those things. They have such a short shelf life though, that's the major difficulty. Want a PDF?
http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/pdf/pomperthird07.pdf
http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/PDF/geneve03.pdf
http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/PDF/PomperHT03c.pdf

[thesummerqueen]

Yeah, the first article touched on that. Short shelf life, good local fruit...support local growers? Hm?

[The Grand Nudger]

Rgr that. They're also pretty hardy as organics, due to being native. So there's that niche and premium as well.

[thesummerqueen]

So I thought I'd share one of the perennials we're learning about right now. Artemisia 'Powis Castle', named for the castle in our dear Hobbit's land:

A wonderful clumping or border plant, very nicely scented I think. It's a member of the same genus as wormwood, which is used to make absinthe, and mugwort, which I had growing my my garden until I realized that letting it grow in the same climate as kudzu produced nearly the same effect. I'm still ripping out straggling bits. Bastard.

I plan to do some posts about "Halloween-esque" plants to bore you all.

[The Grand Nudger]

Kudzu is absolute hotness. For those of you unfamiliar, we have teams of laborers armed with all manner of cutting and clipping devices, poison, chemical suffocants, and yes even flamethrowers, all tasked with the singular purpose of eradicating this invasive. Fun fact, was supposed to be a great new source of animal feed. Had a lot of proponents early on, notably Rodale of organic farming fame. Self inflicted wounds ftw.


(there's a house under all that)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu

[thesummerqueen]

Tomorrow night I might stop at a few points along my 20 minute ride home and take pictures. It's pretty ridiculous.

---

Also, never leave a picture of kudzu on your screen for too long. It'll eat the computer.

[thesummerqueen]

In the spirit of old plants... (It's also one of the trees we learned about)

Currently, Ginkgo biloba is the only known existing species of Ginkgoaceae. The term living fossil is often used to describe Ginkgo biloba since it appears the same today as it did in the past, as seen in the fossil record. This species dates back to about 190 million years ago, but the order to which it belongs, Ginkgoales, can be traced back earlier, to the Permian period. In the mountains of China, the species survived in Buddhist monasteries and were introduced throughout Asia around 1100 AD. It did not reach Europe or America until the 1700s. During the Cretaceous, at least five or six other Ginkgo species existed. Our knowledge of these now-extinct species is based mainly on leaf remains, since the stems and fruits rarely survive the fossilization process (Tidwell's Common Fossil Plants of Western North America (1975)). Leaf shape also helps to distinguish different species from one another. For example, the leaf of Ginkgo dissecta has a deeply dissected blade, as the species name implies, creating several lobes.

Base of one tree:



My teacher had a magazine photo of a man in the branches of one - the tree gets so big that a full grown man looks like a child climbing up it.

[thesummerqueen]

Bump!

Some serious nerd shit for Rhythm: http://aobblog.com/2011/11/the-mysteries...-proteins/

Some serious nerd shit for everyone: http://aobblog.com/2011/11/black-is-the-...%A6-green/

...if Jack O’Malley-James – PhD Student in Astrobiology at the University of St Andrews ... – is correct, extraterrestrial plants may appear black to us humans.

Awesomeness for anyone in the San Fran area (take pictures if you go, you bastards):

http://www.conservatoryofflowers.org/atc...wicked2011

Paralysis, strangulation, derangement – these are just a few of the misdeeds of the plant kingdom as chronicled by award-winning author Amy Stewart in her 2009 New York Times Bestseller, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities. And now, something wicked this way comes. It’s mayhem under glass, as the Conservatory of Flowers transforms its Special Exhibits Gallery into an eerie Victorian garden full of Mother Nature’s most appalling creations.

Daily strange fungus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrus_ruber

Although edibility for C. ruber has not been officially documented,[33] its foul smell would dissuade most individuals from consuming it. In general, stinkhorn mushrooms are considered edible when still in the egg stage, and are even considered delicacies in some parts of Europe and Asia, where they are pickled raw and sold in markets as "devil's eggs".[21] However, an 1854 report provides a cautionary tale to those considering consuming the mature fruit body. Dr. F. Peyre Porcher, of Charleston, South Carolina, described an account of poisoning caused by the mushroom:

"A young person having eaten a bit of it, after six hours suffered from a painful tension of the lower stomach, and violent convulsions. He lost the use of his speech, and fell into a state of stupor, which lasted for forty-eight hours. After taking an emetic he threw up a fragment of the mushroom, with two worms, and mucus, tinged with blood. Milk, oil, and emollient fomentations, were then employed with success."[34]

British mycologist Donald Dring, in his 1980 monograph on the Clathraceae family, wrote that C. ruber was not regarded highly in southern European folklore. He mentions a case of poisoning following its ingestion, reported by Barla in 1858, and notes that Ciro Pollini reported finding it growing on a human skull in a tomb in a deserted church.[20] According to John Ramsbottom, Gascons consider the mushroom a cause of cancer;[35] they will usually bury specimens they find.[6] In other parts of France it has been reputed to produce skin rashes or cause convulsions.[35]

And daily plant (related to a vine I'm currently studying in class):

Parthenocissus thomsonii

Parthenocissus comes from parthenos meaning "virgin" and kissos ("ivy"). It refers to the English common name of the eastern American Virginia creeper or Parthenocissus quinquefolia (Virginia was named for Queen Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen"). Parthenocissus is a genus of about 10 species of climbing plants that climb by means of leaf tendrils that either twine or have adhesive pads (Daniel: for more on the adhesive pads, see the previous entry on Parthenocissus tricuspidata 'Robusta').

Vines are actually a very interesting part of the plant world, and I have an article I might transcribe onto here discussing it, but the reason I think the Parthenocissus group is cool are the adhesive pads described above:



When you see them in real life they're tiny but they help keep entire loads of ivy clinging to a wall.