Prepping for England

The countdown to our trip to England has less than 2 weeks left.  Packing preliminaries look like we'll get everything in our carry-on bags.  Airline reservations have been confirmed.  House-sitter arrangements have been made. 

In a related English matter, looking through Dad's old WW2 ephemera, I came across the photos of the Stucky family and the post-war thank you letter that they sent him.  Since I'll be in London soon, I took a gamble and fired off a letter to the address on the letter, 176 Mill Road, Kettering.  Today to my surprise, I received an airmail post from a Mr. Mike Groom, the current resident of that address.  Saw my first Royal Mail stamp with King Charles visage on it.  

While I'm on the subject, I plan on visiting the shop where Henry bought his ivory chess set.  I'll bring a copy of the receipt and a photo of the set on Lou's walnut and maple board.  

Plant Mindfulness

Plant awareness disparity (PAD)—which was previously known as plant blindness but renamed to avoid ableism—I would prefer to call "plant unawareness."  https://lithub.com/seeing-green-why-we-should-all-be-paying-attention-to-plants/ addresses the negative feedback loop that is PAD.  

Nature's Notebook has been a great way to focus my attention on the details of plant growth and change.  Two Mondays each month has me out in the Cottonwood Gallery (CWG) taking meticulous notes on our specimens.  With our ongoing data collection, we now have 10 years of nearly uninterrupted data.  

For the two years, the Nature's Notebook crew have had their normal access blocked by construction on the Heritage Farm expansion.  The old trail connecting the main gardens with the CWG winds through the Farm and the slow work on the upgrade to the entire area meant that our trail could not be used.  Fortunately, our Education Coordinator got the BioPark management to allow us to use the back service road and a temporary path to get to the CWG.  

Now, as the construction on the Heritage Farm is winding up (maybe by October?), they're getting around to restoring the CWG trails.  What little work has been done this summer damaged two of the plants we've been observing.  Not wanting to cause any more damage, I was asked to clearly mark the specimens with red construction tape.  

The small perennials like Penistemon, Ericameria, and Asclepias were marked with perimeter flags drapped with red tape. 

What's left of Penistemon ambigua

Larger shrubs were "gift wrapped" for high visibility.

The screwbean mesquite

Mature trees simply had their trunks wrapped. 

A Siberian elm

We're hoping that whoever resurfaces the CWG trail and clears the deadfall is paying a little attention to our bright red warning tape.  Time will tell if they ignore it and damage more of our specimens.  It's one thing to be "plant unaware" and another thing to just not care at all.  

The BioPark

It's been a long day at the BioPark Botanic Garden.  First, we made our usual Nature's Notebook observations.  We've had to add a new cottonwood after that windstorm that severely damage the tree in Site #1.   Here's a photo of Sandy taking a diameter measurement of the replacement sapling in  Site #3. 

Then after a quick bite for lunch, Sheila and I prepped for the last herbarium workshop of the summer.  We had 5 high school students plus one councilor and they all enjoyed the session.  They worked their way through 25 specimens, mounting and labeling them for us.  Sometime in the next couple days, I'll have to move the dried pages out of the Atrium and back to the herbarium.  

Herbaria

Despite my disgust at the way the New York Times is leading the charge to dismiss President Biden, I haven't dropped my subscription.  That's because sometimes they do right.  This time it's a guest opinion piece on the value of herbaria.  

At the Botanic Garden, we host a handful of herbarium workshops every summer to high school students involved in Camp BioPark.  Typically, a workshop runs 2-3 hours and has a small group of interested students learn about pressing plants, mounting specimens, and labeling the collection.  

As the number of specimens in our collection grows, we are way behind in digitization.  We had lined up Jerry Goffe's studio for use in doing a mass digitization day, but unfortunately he passed away unexpectedly before we could begin the work.  

Also, it's time we held another herbarium workshop for the other docents.  With my upcoming travel in September, that will likely have to wait until October.

Sheila Conneen and herbarium students

Plastic Free July

Once again I'm taking the plastic free eco-challenge.   So far it's going fairly well.  We've replaced a huge number of plastic food storage containers with Corning glassware.  The years (decades?!) old plastic is being upcycled to a friend for storage of materials for her home business, soap manufacture.  

In other plastic-free news, Marc Gunn over at http://www.celticmusicpodcast.com/ announced that he is involved this month.  Normally, his podcast is just Celtic and Irish music, but today's e-mail blast  from him encouraged others to join the eco-challenge.  

In other recycling news, the ABQ Bonsai Club is trying to increase the utility of its library collection.  The book checkout process is being streamlined and the old collection of periodicals will be cataloged and either auctioned off or sold online.  

Burt Pendleton, club librarian

Rain

Yesterday it rained... and rained.  For the entire evening we netted 2.3" of precipitation, most of it during two large squalls.  Amazingly, the yard survived with little negative impact.  Stella was caught out in the storm, but we finally got her home.  No idea where Fluffy the feral cat goes in a storm like that, but she turned up dry and happy for breakfast this morning. 

Meanwhile, my conservation reading took a turn to Aldo Leopold.  This being the centennial of the Gila Wilderness, there are many pieces being written about him and his thoughts.  Here's part of the preface to the 1948 edition of The Sand County Almanac:   

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

...

Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias. But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to tum off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.

Extinction

The Arnold Arboretum e-mailed out this link -- https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/collections-extinction-abundance/ -- and that has got me thinking about endangered species, conservation, and all that.  In turn an old college friend sent me two interesting articles that discussed global issues, biodiversity, resilience, and sustainability.  That led to this reply to him:  

The planetary commons article was a good read and it meshed well with my current reading, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2024.1349350/full. Another illustration of the difference between a global commons and a planetary commons turned up recently in https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/the-impact-of-the-us-mexico-border-wall-on-biodiversity, where the disruption by The Former Guy's border wall is apparent at the local and regional level, including human social. 

 

NM has a state-level effort for protecting rare plants and they link to a UNM website, https://nhnm.unm.edu/botany/nm_rare_plant_conservation_strategy, with its map of conservation targets.  By the way, that map pretty much shows you where to go for interesting outdoor hikes. 

 

Meanwhile, the border wall seems to have stopped everything but human beings--https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2024/the-impact-of-the-us-mexico-border-wall-on-biodiversity.  

Just for fun, here's a photo of Black-eyed Susans at Bike-in-Coffee taken during yesterday's ride.  We peddled from the Nature Center down and back, using unpaved paths as much as possible.