General Grounds

One of the things I like most about being a docent at the Botanic Garden is General Grounds.  That's simply wandering around the garden and interacting with the visitors, answering their questions.  

General Grounds has been shut down due to Covid-19 restrictions since last spring.  I've been in the garden since then, but only as a BioPark Society employee, the plant label guy.  Now, coming up on the 1 year anniversary of the Governor's order to close down, the BioPark has resumed General Grounds.  

There was a training package I had to read online and then a trivial quiz to take.  I expect to hear from garden education staff that I'm cleared for duty in a day or so. 

With my first dose of the Moderna vaccine under my belt and in my arm, I'm looking forward to (a) the second dose and (b) the purported 95% protection afforded by about two weeks later.  That means by the first of April, I should be as good as I can be for getting back to docent duty.  

And along with General Grounds, I should be good to go with the Nature's Notebook group at the same time.  That will have me back in the swing of things just as the garden starts to bust out with the big flush of blooms.  Crab apples and cherry blossoms typically start to pop from mid-March to early April.  

NM Rare Plants

The New Mexico Rare Plants Technical Council met on Friday morning.  As with all things impacted by Covid, the meeting was online via Zoom, which means I can eavesdrop from the comfort of home.   

Their website was upgraded this past year and is extremely handy for my monthly column on Facebook.  I highlight a rare or endangered species of NM plant on the last Saturday of each month.  That would be today and I've already uploaded my essay on Mentzelia todiltoensis to the New Mexico Native Plants group page.  Here's a copy for convenience of non-FB types. 

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Mentzelia todiltoensis

This month's rare plant of the month is... Mentzelia todiltoensis N.D. Atwood & S.L. Welsh. It also goes by the common name of Todilto stickleaf or Jemez Mountain stickleaf. It's relatively new to science, being collected in 2004 and described in 2005. SEINet tells us that Mentzelia is named for Christian Mentzel (1622-1701), a German botanist, botanical author, and physician. The specific epithet refers to the Todilto Formation, a geologic gypsum formation to which the species is restricted.

N.D. Atwood refers to Nephi Duane Atwood, born in 1938 and has been botanizing throughout the Southwest for many decades. Duane has been assistant herbarium curator at Brigham Young University in Utah and a former botanist for the U.S. Forest Service. Stanley Larson Welsh (born 1928) is an American botanist. He has worked as professor of integrative biology at Brigham Young University for 44 years and was the founding curator of that university's herbarium, which is named after him. Since M. todiltoensis was collected in 2005, our botanists were 66 and 76 years old at the time. Let's face it, this gives us old grey beards hope that we can botanize into our golden years.

One of the wonders of our interweb connected era is that with a few clicks you can find references to this rare plant on JSTOR and Encyclopedia of Life, among others. There we find the repository of the pressed and dried isotype specimen at NHMUK. That's the herbarium code for the Natural History Museum in the UK. Using their online search, it's just a hop and a skip to the digital entry with its photographs, map, and geo-coordinates. Google Maps does the rest... https://goo.gl/maps/C9fWQ5PjB2amBNBW9 showing us the type location in Torrance County southeast of Mountainair.

Not every rare plant collection will publish detailed locations. Many that I've come across writing this monthly column have the site of collection redacted to protect rare habitat.

The description from NM Rare Plants: Perennial herb; stems several from the base, white, stout, leafy, 2.2-8 dm tall, sparsely covered with minute, reflexed or spreading barbed hairs; basal leaves not persistent; stem leaves entire or with a few short laciniate [edges irregularly and finely slashed] lobes, linear to narrowly oblanceolate [with the more pointed end at the base], revolute or flat, up to 11.5 cm long, 0.5-3.8 mm wide; leaf hairs sparse, bases pustulate [bulging]; inflorescence corymbosely-branched [lower pedicels longer than the upper ones] on upper part of stems with a single flower terminating the several branches; flowers sessile or subsessile, subtended by linear, entire or remotely laciniate bracts; calyx lobes spreading or reflexed in fruit; corolla and stamens sulfur yellow when opening, quickly fading to creamy white when fully open; petals usually 10 (9-12), oblanceolate, 11-13 mm long, 2.5-4 mm wide; staminodia absent or in 1 whorl, abruptly grading to fertile stamens with progressively narrower and shorter filaments; capsules subcylindrical, 8-12 mm long, 5-6 mm wide; seeds lenticular, winged. Flowers open in the evening hours, late June through September.

The gypsum habitat in Santa Fe County is presently being surface mined at Rosario. Todilto gypsum outcrops at the southern populations in Bernalillo and Cibola counties have high quality gypsum that is not presently being mined. This plant also occurs on the low-quality gypsum of outcrop margins where it is unlikely to be impacted by gypsum mining. Additional field surveys are needed to determine the size and extent of known populations and to locate any additional populations. Sounds like a great excuse for a field trip next summer.

Mentzelias are some of my favorite species with their stellate hairs, which is what causes them to stick to your pants or socks if you walk past one. No doubt those hairs on the fruit aid in dispersal. They have a distinctive Velcro-like feel to the touch. Next time you're near the more common M. multiflora, check the surface out under a hand lens.

 

Winter Hibiscus

The Hibiscus in the sunroom is blooming again.  Frankly, it's barely paused all winter.   Toozday it gave us a double... 

... and it looks like it will do a triple or a quad soon.  

Democratic Demagoguery

I'm  typing this on a Monday evening, trying hard to stay ahead of my blog posting schedule.  I'm waiting for a Democratic Party Zoom meeting for Ward 10A.  I'm the Zoom Tech and I'm in charge of the waiting room.  

I worked one yesterday with about 30 participants and it was a little chaotic.  That was largely due to the ward chair having audio problems.  Tonight we have only 19, so it's easy to manage.

In other matters, Percy finally transmitted the videos of The Descent, aka La Bajada.  It's truly amazing to see the heat shield get jettisoned, the parachute deploy, the lander fire its rockets, and the dust-up as the surface is approached.  Then we get dual views, one from the lander looking down at the rover and another of the rover looking up at the lander.  Truly amazing stuff!  

https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance

A Woden's Day Musing

It's actually Monday morning around 3:30 a.m. as I type this.  Henry Cat woke me up needing to be fed.  I obliged him with Fancy Feast canned Turkey and Cheese in Gravy.  He eats about half a can, then comes up to my lap.  

That's quite a journey these days for an old, half-blind cat.  First he finds the chair in the corner and hops up to the cushion.  From there he can step up on the arm and make it to the side table.  Right now there are only three teddy bears there (Herr Professor Bear, Louie, and Wee Willie) and they stay out of his way.  From the side table, Henry Cat strolls along my credenza, steps over the printer's paper tray, and cautiously takes a step onto the corner of the disk.  I think the white paper on a clipboard contrasts with the brown wood of the desk and helps him find his footing.  Once on the desk, he comes over in front of the keyboard (so much for typing) and waits for me to motion with my hands where my lap is.  It must be hard to see because it's in the shadow of the desk and not lit by the glow from my monitor.  At any rate, Henry will gingerly feel his way down, left paw first, find my leg, and then climb fully down onto my lap.

It's a very special time for the two of us.  He's be half-blind for a year now, but we only just learned that he probably has intestinal lymphoma.  No telling how much time he has left, a few months or several years.  Either way, he's welcome to my lap any time.

After a long time getting petted and scritched behind the ears (his favorite thing), he hops off to the floor.  I'll fluff up his bowl of food or refill it entirely and he'll slowly munch down some more.  Occasionally, he'll eat most of two full cans.  

After that, maybe he'll take a long, slow drink of water.  Then finally we saunter ever so slowly out of my office and down the dark hallway into the great room.  Somehow he always find his way despite the dark and his poor eyesight and we get into the sunroom where he chooses a favorite chair.  Tonight it's the back right one closest to the bedroom door.  He jumps up with surprising ease and turns around a time or two.  I pet him until he relaxes and settles down.  He likes to lay there with his front paws just over the front edge of the cushion.  

We'll likely find him sound asleep on the same cushion in the morning. He might want a 7:00 snack or he might sleep well into the afternoon.  Either way, tomorrow night I'll probably have him on my lap again while I type another blog post.

3rd Saturday Recap

Here's a couple screen grabs from last weekend's 3rd Saturday Bonsai Workshop.  First we have Master Egert-san and Number One Son working on their repotting project with root-over-rock corkbark oaks.

Next we have a wild-collected oak that Karl Reineke harvested in the Gila a couple weeks ago.  Former president Tim Arnold is shown making a Zoom comment in the side panel.

 

Location, Location, Location

Dave Ferguson and I will be working on Monday morning with the old legacy database of Botanic Garden collections.  The task at hand, extracting location information for the major perennials.  After massaging that data, we'll hand it off to the new company, IrisBG, for inclusion in their product when it gets installed later this year.  

We're all set for Zooming this morning.  Dave will login to BGBase and screen share to my desktop here at home.  With any luck, Dave will still remember how to access the system and run queries.  Anything we come up with, we'll dump to .xls or .pdf.  

After that, it's up to me to get it into some kind of acceptable format for IrisBG.  

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In a sobering side note today, the U.S. passed the 500,000 mark in Covid-19 deaths.  President Biden, VP Harris, and their spouses held a moment of silence.  The White House is draped in black bunting and lit with 500 candles.  

Sustainability, Resilience, Reciprocity

I continue to read Braiding Sweetgrass.  Very much a lovely story strong on gratitude.  Take only what is offered, what you need.  Leave something in gratitude.  

Not sure how that applies to Percy, now on Mars.  Here's a photo of Perseverance on the way down. 

So, back to today's theme:  reciprocity and related concepts.  Sustainability as in sustainable agriculture sounds great on the face of it.  But is that really the case?  A sustainable system merely means that levels of output can be maintained over time.  That implies that we can continue to abuse our land and water for agricultural production at the current levels indefinitely.  

Resilience as in resilient cities sound great on the fact of it.  But is that really the case?  A resilient system merely means that it can return to a previous level after perturbation.  That implies that we can design cities that can absorb shocks and insults indefinitely.  

The year of the pandemic and its disruption to our way of life is revealing.  The Great Texas Power Failure is another example.  Social systems, production systems, energy systems, and educational systems were found to be neither sustainable nor resilient.  

Are these types of agricultural systems and means of living failing at a more fundamental level?  Are increasing crop areas and enlarging cities necessarily a good thing?  Is infinite growth (a theoretically impossible thing) even worth pursuing in a on-going manner?  Surely we will start hitting boundary conditions on various resources, some sooner than others.  Here's the donut diagram.

The concept of reciprocity enters in when we give back something to the systems that sustain us.  Entire cycles of matter and energy have to be completed in a way that allows us to live in harmony with our environment, the only one we have, the one that sustains us.  

Second Third Saturday Workshop

We're at it again... tormenting our tiny trees with February bonsai workshop, the second one of 2021.  This will be broadcast via Zoom direct from beautiful downtown Socorro and hosted by our succulent sensei, John Egert.  Albuquerque Bonsai Club members should check their e-mail for the link to online session.  

That would be John on the left.

A recent article in the news media reported on the corkscrew-like movements of root apices as they grow through soil.  https://phys.org/news/2021-02-time-lapse-reveals-hidden-roots.html is worth reading.  Check out the time-lapse video, too.  

What Condition my Condition is in?

Two days post vaccination... and here's the update.  Sore arm in the vicinity of the injection.  Makes it tricky to sleep on my left side.  Right arm is sore from favoring my left arm while vacuuming and shoveling snow.  Had about 4 hours of chills late last night, but it had passed by morning.

Next jab is scheduled for St. Patrick's Day, a month from now.  

Meanwhile...

Yesterday's snow, which was a ½ inch dusting on top of frozen rain, disappeared by noon.  Temps are heading back towards seasonal (whatever that is in a world of climate change).  Texas is just regaining power after catastrophic blackouts.  

Reminded me of the time Lou and I drove down to visit Paul in Houston after Christmas.  We left Los Alamos and it was 35°.  Arrived in Houston and it was 28°!  Burst pipes created frozen water sculptures in people's front yards.  The Botanic Garden was a frozen, grey, desolate place even with an amazing collection of trees in the arboretum.  We went down to Galveston Bay and walked on a freezing cold beach, then retreated to the battleship Texas.  Damn, that hunk of metal was sooo cold.  I'm sure that under steam she'd be a toasty place, but not on that day.

Somewhere during the trip, Paul took us to a favorite oyster shack.  Lou was uninitiated, so we thought to order a dozen fried and a dozen raw, to see which he favored.  The guy behind the counter asked, "Each?"  We thought he was asking if we wanted a dozen of each.  We replied in the affirmative.  Instead we received 3 dozen fried and 3 dozen raw, one full order for each of us.  We devoured them all.  Might've left a few French fries on the table.  Yumm!

Sticking the Landing

The Mars rover Perseverance will experience its "7 minutes of terror" today.   Stand by for updates. 

Here's the first image from NASA.

Vaccination Day

Got "the Jab" today.  Moderna, take #1.  Scooted over to Romero Family Practice at noon and Mr. Dr. Romero gave us the spiel, checked our vitals, and then a tech administered the vaccine.  Totally painless.  Damn that tech was good.  

It turns out the Moderna people sent 20 gauge needles but the viscosity of the vaccine doesn't require them.  So RFP is using long but thinner 25 gauge needles.  I approve.  

Waited 15 minutes, then they checked us for a reaction.  We were cleared to go, got our vaccine card, and scheduled #2 for St. Patrick's Day.  

For our efforts, the weather held off until after we were home to start snowing again.  Nothing significant and rather pretty.

It's 9:30 pm and only the very slightest of tenderness on the injection site.  We'll see what the morrow brings.  

Speaking of tomorrow, I'll be up at the crack of dawn giving Henry a dose of Gabapentin, his anti-anxiety drug of choice.  Then he gets loaded up in the carrier for a trip to Aztec Animal Clinic and an abdominal ultrasound.  

We pick Henry up around 2:00 when we also take Paddy for a simple blood draw.  Gotta check his T4 every 6 months or so.  

Impeachment for Crimes Against Nature

This week and last has been consumed by the impeachment trial of he-who-shall-not-be-named.  Incitement of insurrection is the basis for the single article of impeachment.  I, on the other hand, would prefer that in the long list of high crimes and misdemeanors there was mention of his crimes against nature. 

It's simple enough to mention over 100 environmental regulations and laws that he has rolled back.  Of course, it won't be easy to overturn those roll-backs; the ship of state is massive and doesn't turn on a dime.  But the Biden administration has begun the process.  We can only hope that the time lost can be regained.  We've squandered 4 years.  

Most notably, the U.S. is back in the game with the return to the Paris Accords.  The problem is that the Paris agreement doesn't do enough.  The world is on track to overshoot threshold CO2 levels with dire consequences.  

The drop in carbon dioxide emissions during the Covid-19 lockdown is proof that emissions can be reduced.  However, it's a certainty that they'll bounce back as things return to some sort of new normal.  

Tree = Air + Sunshine + Water

Trees are amazing constructions of air, sunshine, and water plus a miniscule amount of soil.  Far and away, they are mostly water.  Through the wonder of photosynthesis, they capture the energy of the sun's rays and use it to break carbon dioxide in half.  In the process they release oxygen as a waste product and sequester the energy as carbon-water compounds we know as carbohydrates.  

When you think about it, trees are remarkably sturdy for being made up of such ethereal components.   

If you desiccate an entire tree, what is left will be mostly wood made mostly of lignan.  Wood is made up of the dead conducting cells of the xylem plus other, softer cells that have been reinforced after a year or two of use.  

The lignified cells are notoriously resistant to biological processes and only a few organisms can digest it.  we think of termites as wood eaters, but in reality, it is the bacteria in their gut that let them break down wood.  Termites are merely wood-chewing insects that are feeding the wood-eating bacteria that they keep inside.  

In truth, there are other things like nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, the macronutrients, in significant quantities.  They do important functions by being a critical part of DNA, proteins, and membranes.  None-the-less, they are dwarfed by the amount of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in a living tree.  

In even smaller quantities are the micronutrients.  These are needed only in trace amounts--elements like magnesium, silicon, iron, selenium, and a long list of others.  

Valentine's Day

News Flash!!!  

Snow has been falling as the temperatures plunge here in the Near North Valley.  We could have quite a few inches by morning.  

As a post-doc in the NMSU Department of Horticulture, the professors were looking to offload some of their non-academic obligations on me.  One of those was faculty oversight of the Hort Forum, the club for Horticulture majors.  It was not an onerous job for a bachelor, spend an evening or a morning working with the almost exclusively female students.  

The club's activities centered on the horticultural calendar:  Poinsettias at Christmas, lilies at Easter, bouquets for Mother's Day, chile ristras in the fall.  Perhaps the biggest event in the year was the sale of roses for Valentine's Day.

The order would've been placed with florists months ahead.  The thousands of stems would arrive the week before V-Day.  Then the club would hold an all-evening session to prepare the roses.  Each bloom was carefully de-thorned by hand.  Then a thin florist's wire was hooked into the base of the flower and spiraled down the stem.  This would keep the rose from nodding as it aged.  

Finally, the flowers were placed in florist buckets and stashed in the roo-sized vegetable coolers.  Care was taken to make sure no fruits were in there with them.  The ethylene from a few old apples would've catastrophically "ripened" our precious roses overnight.

Then it was only a matter of advertisement and holding the rose sale a day or two before Valentine's.  The club would always sell out and the profit margin was significant.  More importantly, the students learned the process, the timing, and the mechanism for hosting a florally themed event.  

Later in spring, the club would gather on a Saturday morning and guided by a knowledgeable faculty member (that would not be me), we'd prune the ornamental roses in the beds in front of the Ag Building.  With that, we would've completed the commercial lifecycle of the rose business.  

Theobroma, Triticum, Juglans, Saccharum, Vanilla

Theobroma cacao -- chocolate

Triticum sativum -- wheat

Juglans nigra -- black walnut

Saccharum officinarum -- sugarcane

Vanilla plantifolia -- vanilla bean orchid

To these plants I owe a huge debt.  Together with baking soda, salt, and water plus the judicious application of heat, they transform into that most delectable of snacks, the chocolate chip cookie.  

From the Hershey website:  

INGREDIENTS

1 cup     butter (2 sticks) , softened

¾ cup     granulated sugar

¾ cup     light brown sugar packed

1 teaspoon   vanilla extract

2             eggs

2¼ cups       all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon   baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups     HERSHEY'S Milk Chocolate Chips (11.5-oz. pkg.)

1 cup     nuts chopped

DIRECTIONS

1. Heat oven to 375°F.

2. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla in large bowl with mixer until creamy. Add eggs; beat well. Stir together flour, baking soda and salt; gradually add to butter mixture, beating until well blended. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts, if desired. Drop by teaspoons onto ungreased cookie sheet.

3. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool slightly; remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

DEVOUR

Psithurism

That silent 'p' is one of those giveaways that a word is of Greek derivation.  Psithurism sounds like it should be condition that effects Star Wars evil-doers.  Instead, it refers to the wind in the trees.  

Air as it moves past an object exerts pressure, causes vortices, and ultimately makes vibrations that we detect as sound.  Leaves that touch one another can also create different layers of sonic vibrations.  It is a form of white noise, a sound comprised of many different frequencies similar to the sound of running water or the hiss of static on a radio*.  

Some trees are designed to enhance this effect.  The quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides, has the root of the word 'tremble' in its Latin binomial.  The tree was named by André Michaux as part of his botanical explorations of North America in the late 18th century.  He and his son deserve a separate essay.  

Because the petiole of the leaf is flattened perpendicularly to the blade, the slightest air movement causes an oscillation... and psithurism in a grove of aspen.  Aspen often form large clones, resulting in entire mountainsides being covered with the trees and their pleasant sound can carry with the hillwalker as one passes through.  

The closely related Populus deltoides (photo above) is also known for the sounds it makes.  This cottonwood has the additional trait of holding onto most of its leaves during winter.  Known as marcescence, this means that even in the dead of winter, the gentle sigh of the wind in the canopy of our bosque may be heard. 

Alas, with a storm bearing down on the state this weekend, I don't expect to spend much time enjoying the relaxing sounds of the breeze in the cottonwoods up the street.  Instead, it will likely be a near gale, and when that is past, a couple inches of snow.  With the snow, will come its own sonic wonder:  the muffled stillness of new snow on the landscape. 

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* Does anyone listen to a real radio anymore?  In my car, I mostly listen to Sirius XM digital music.  Now that I'm not commuting to and from work daily, I don't listen to too much NPR.  But recently I discovered http://radio.garden/, a wonderful global map of radio stations.  It deserves it's own essay in the days ahead.  

Allergies

Juniper season is upon us.  True, this weekend's storm should set them back a bit, but by in large, they'll be busy pollinating each other as soon as things dry out.  

Somewhere along the way, I got dosed with enough juniper pollen to cause my immune system to respond.  The result is a seasonal allergy to the juniper blooming.  I manage with Rx eyedrops and Flonaise... and the occasional hair-of-the-dog.

Spring into Winter

As I mentioned yesterday, the weather has been splendid -- highs in the mid 60's, not much wind.  That said, it's not at all typical of February in Albuquerque.  This is often our coldest month with plenty of wind and either snow or chilly rain.  

So it comes as no surprise that this weekend's forecast is for windy, cloudy, snowy, and bitterly cold weather.  The Weather Underground graphic shows the clouds gathering today, a brief break for sunshine tomorrow, and then the next wave arriving on an overcast Friday.  The snow should start sometime Saturday night into Sunday morning.  Valentine's Day will see snow showers and possibly 2" of the white stuff.  After the storm departs, overnight low temperatures are expected to crash into the teens by Monday morning.

Time to get out the tarps to cover the bonsai.  

Plant Labels

It was a lovely warm afternoon in the HDRG.  After a few minutes hammering in the new metal labels, I had to shed my pullover.   When I first placed them last week, I thought to angle them in the manner of the current generation of plastic labels.  Those have a smart 45° tilt to make it easier for the garden visitor to read.  

But these metal labels with their 15" stakes are orthogonal.  It was either hammer them in at an angle for readability or vertical placement for uniformity.  In the end, uniformity trumped readability, in large part due to the ease of reading a vertically placed label and due to the esthetically pleasing arrangement that it made.

Also, last season's metal labels in the Pollinator Pavilion are also vertically placed.  If the northern half of the garden had angled labels and the southern half had vertical labels, eventually we'd have a great nonconformity where they met.  

It didn't take long to pull up the angled labels and relocate them.  A carpenter's square let me quickly measure off 6" from the curb of the path.  The recent irrigation of the beds meant that I could usually push them in by hand until they were 3-4" high.  A handful were in hard-packed soil or had roots down below interfering.  For those, my handy rubber mallet did the trick.  

Finishing up quickly, I then walked the perimeter berms and borders, taking notes on which plants need labels.  Those will be in the next order.  Stay tuna'ed. 

Transpiration

 Transpiration--a peculiar word for the type of "breathing" that a plant does.  Carbon dioxide in, water and oxygen out.  Microscopic pores in the leaf surface called stomata are the conduits through which these gases are exchanged.  Here's an image of a spiderwort leaf showing the structures (green) sprinkled across the underside.

Stomata are comprised of an opening called a stoma (meaning "mouth") surrounded by guard cells that control the opening and closing.  Adjacent epidermal cells support the stomate.

At yesterday's bonsai club meeting, I presented my monthly Zoom talk on plant structure and function.  The topic was appropriate to the season:  cold hardiness.  Next month's presentation will be on wind (appropriate for March) and its effect on our small trees.  So expect more essays on the movement of water in plants, water loss, and the mysterious boundary layer.  

The Winter Garden

I've been meaning to get to the Winter Garden for most of the week, but I keep getting distracted.  Here's the photo I took last Monday of Poppy Hill at the Botanic Garden's Heritage Farm.  Rather desolate and univiting.

But hidden in the dun landscape, life lives on.  It's early February, yet here are rosettes of Penstemon neomexicana.  An endangered species endemic to the Sacramento Mountains, the ex sito population here can provide insurance in case a calamitous wildfire strikes their native range.  Additionally, it affords a wonderful (and lovely) teaching moment during garden tours.  

Nestled in amoung the Penstemon are the much taller dried stalks of prickly poppy, Argemone pinnatasecta.  These rare poppies survive only in a handful of drainages in the Sacramento Mountains above Alamogordo.  The closely related A. pleiacantha is much more common throughout New Mexico.  Fortunately, none is found within 5 miles of the Heritage Farm, so the gene pool of this rare and endangered poppy is protected.

By mid-Summer these will be bursting with large white blossoms that catch the eye.  Indeed, we harvested them as specimen #1 when Sheila Conneen and I began pressing samples for the little herbarium in the Education Building.

Today's posting is too easy... a link to my presentation on cold hardiness in bonsai.  https://prezi.com/p/npncfahejnwu/cold-hardiness-implications-for-bonsai/?present=1 

It's the first Saturday of the month and time for the second meeting of 2021 for the Albuquerque Bonsai Club.  Sticking to the club schedule, I'm on the hook for a quasi-geeky presentation on plant structure and function.  Enjoy the Prezi show. 

The Metal Labels

Last Monday was a lovely day with a smattering of clouds drifting by and next to no wind.  After lunch I was down at the Botanic Garden and out into the HDRG.  Even though I brought a jacket and a wind breaker, the air was warm enough to go without either.  

I asked one of the few gardeners around to unlock the Atrium door for me and, lo!, there was a box full of the new labels tucked under the microwave table.   They were wrapped in plastic in pairs, one facing up, the other down, to protect them from abrasion during shipping.  

I brought out my annotated maps and we were off to the races.  As I unwrapped each pair, I'd search for their name on the map and place it on the tables appropriately.  When I had a handful for a particular bed, I'd take them out to the garden itself and track down the actual plant to be labelled.  

I asked the only gardener I saw (from a more than safe social distance) if they looked better going straight into the ground or at an angle.  We both agreed the angle was easier to read.

As seen in the wintery view above, the labels aren't exactly showstoppers.  Brown cottonwood leaves, bare rose branches, faded groundcovers, all contribute to a dour landscape.  At least the light sculptures from the River of Lights have been taken down.  

As things green up in the coming months, I think the labels will do their job nicely.  The Curator of 

Plants, Maria Thomas, is considering the straight up and down placement, but her predecessor, Jon Stewart, likes the angled arrangement.  Will just have to see how this works out.  

The Plant Press

I've been pressing plants since 1972 and Dr. Spellenberg's Plant Taxonomy course at NMSU.  Back then I packed a small pair of solid 1/2" thick boards tied together with sleeping bag straps up into the Organ Mountains when I was climbing.  My collection (limited by the lack of a car) was mostly from in town and made up of lots of ornamentals.  

Then in grad school at the U of A, we had proper presses with real corrugates.  The Grasses, Legumes, and Composites course was really a challenge.  But field work with Dr. Gibson involved collecting cacti, notoriously difficult to preserve.  Some of my materials are still in the permanent collection.  As a teaching assistant for Dr. Mason's Plant Taxonomy class, I was out every weekend in a university truck collecting material for the next week's dissection.  And then there was a trip deep into Mexico looking for Stegnosperma cubense near Vera Cruz.  Along the way, I managed to climb Iztaccihuatl (and later, Popocatépetl). 

After that, I did little in the way of plant collection.  Anything I did harvest had to be layered in paper towels or newspaper and squashed under a stack of heavy books. 

Now in retirement and active with the Botanic Garden, I've been using their plant press... until this past Christmas.  Caro got me a proper full-sized personal plant press.  Also a small microwave plant dehydrator.  I've been hay baling ever since.  Here's today's harvest of 3 (out of 4) Hibiscus blooms.

These are now in the press along with dozens of other winter blossoms from plants in the sun room. 

From Wikipedia, "The botanical gardens of the modern tradition were established in northern Italy, the first being at Pisa (1544), founded by Luca Ghini (1490–1556).  Although part of a medical faculty, the first chair of materia medica, essentially a chair in botany, was established in Padua in 1533.  Then in 1534, Ghini became Reader in materia medica at Bologna University, where Ulisse Aldrovandi established a similar garden in 1568.  Collections of pressed and dried specimens were called a hortus siccus (garden of dry plants) and the first accumulation of plants in this way (including the use of a plant press) is attributed to Ghini.  Buildings called herbaria housed these specimens mounted on card with descriptive labels.  Stored in cupboards in systematic order they could be preserved in perpetuity and easily transferred or exchanged with other institutions, a taxonomic procedure that is still used today."

Ecosystem Services

 I was going to write about the garden in winter, both my backyard and the BioPark, but another topic has come up.  A 600+ page report on the economics of biodiversity has been released by the UK government.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/final-report-the-economics-of-biodiversity-the-dasgupta-review

The New York Times has picked up the story under the headline "Nature Doesn't Get a Paycheck."

I've long known that ecosystem services are critical to cycles of life.  Likewise, I've realized that we rarely pay the full (or even partial) price for them.  Now someone has attempted to put a price tag on the value of biodiversity.  Here are their 10 take-away messages.

1. Our economies, livelihoods and well-being all depend on our most precious asset: Nature.
2. We have collectively failed to engage with Nature sustainably, to the extent that our demands far exceed its capacity to supply us with the goods and services we all rely on.
3.  Our unsustainable engagement with Nature is endangering the prosperity of current and future generations.
4. At the heart of the problem lies deep-rooted, widespread institutional failure.
5. The solution starts with understanding and accepting a simple truth: our economies are embedded within Nature, not external to it.
6. We need to change how we think, act and measure success.
7. Ensure that our demands on Nature do not exceed its supply, and that we increase Nature’s supply relative to its current level.
8. Change our measures of economic success to guide us on a more sustainable path.
9. Transform our institutions and systems – in particular our finance and education systems – to enable these changes and sustain them for future generations.
10. Transformative change is possible – we and our descendants deserve nothing less.

Groundhog Day

Yesterday I was down at the HDRG placing the new metal labels.  It took about 3 hours to get them out into the ground. The box had about 50 of them, each one below was packaged with another facing downward.  Lots of plastic.

As I unwrapped them, I sorted them by the bed that the rose was located in.  If I didn't find it immediately, I simply alphabetized them for later.

I was happily working on tables in the Atrium and when I had a reasonable tranche of labels, I'd trundle out to the HDRG and place them.  After consulting with a single gardener passing by, I elected to put them in at a rakish angle for ease of viewing by visitors.   

On the way out, I passed by Poppy Hill at the edge of the Heritage Farm.  It looks pretty sad in the middle of winter.  By summer, this will be vibrant with the growth of two species of endangered plants.   

A closer examination shows that the Argemone pinnatisecta have a few green leaves in a rosette at their base.  It looks like the gardeners have harvested all the seedheads. 

 

Meanwhile, the Penstemon neomexicana are sporting significant rosettes.  

A New Day, a New Month

My last weekend in January efforts were successful:  4 beautiful baguettes and a huge pot of Jamie Oliver's beef stew.  

I owe much of this to Caro and Debbie for the baguette basket and the state-of-the-art baguette pan.  The results were some of the best baguettes I've ever made.  

I must admit, my baking game has been kicked up a notched.  Now I've mastered baguettes as well as crumpets.  Every time I cook something these days, I'm thankful.  

Meanwhile, on the garden front, the plan is to spend the afternoon placing the new labels in the HDRG.  Photos to follow tomorrow.