It is Autumn Flower Time

Autumn snowflakes and autumn crocuses are two flowers that bloom in the Autumn but the names sound like they belong in another season.  Flowers with really strange names include: Monkey Face Orchid Bat plant Moth Orchid Corpse Flower Naked Man Orchid Hooker's Lips You can see the pictures and more strange plants here. I did some colour interpretations on a sunflower picture.  In August, when I took the picture, the leaves were a dazzling yellow green.  If I interpret it for Autumn now, the second picture shows the darkening of the leaves and the third picture would be a late Autumn version where blue-green is predominant.

Statistical Thinking in Niagara

I've been gathering statistics to see how successful the website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages are for our upcoming fundraise The Fantasy of Trees. I was lucky to get statistical training as part of an MBA. Statistical thinking has become the interpretive technology of choice in dozens of fields: economics, psychology, education, medicine, and the sciences.  The internet headlines tell us there are 5 important website statistics, the most important economic statistic, the best offensive statistic in sports, customer experience statistics, Black Friday's most important statistic.   I wonder about the critical thinking skills of people in general and this is a question that's been analyzed a lot.  Paul Barsch's article on Eight Things You Should Know About Statistics says this: "In May 2010’s issue of Wired Magazine, author Clive Thompson laments the poor mathematical literacy of his fellow citizens. For example, he cites people laughing at the concept of global warming as they face some of the harsher winters on record, or the extra-vocal debate on vaccines and possible links to autism. Mr. Thompson would tell us that it’s the trend lines that matter, and we too often look at the trees and miss the forest. The problem, he says, is that “statistics is hard” and an overall understanding of this important discipline is severely lacking. He says, “If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on, and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to.” Quora/Wikipedia say: Therefore, as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease.

To Blossom is To Bloom

I was thinking of the difference between the words flowers, blossoms, and blooms.   It seems like we wouldn't say "Look at that rose blossom".  Instead, we might say "Look at the rose blooming".   We think of fruit trees - apples, cherries, plums, almonds, peaches, etc as having blossoms, being blossom trees, and blossoming in the spring.  One site says that blossoms don't flower, but flowers do blossom. That seemed poetic indeed. Blooming seems to occur with flowers/flowering plants.   It doesn't seem typical to comment that the orchard is blooming.  We would comment that the roses are blooming.  These differences seem subtle and tricky, and refer to the literal meaning of flower, blossom and bloom.  To continue with the literal meaning, this comes from Collins English Dictionary for bloom.   1. countable noun A bloom is the flower on a plant. [literary , technical] ...the sweet fragrance of the white blooms. Harry carefully picked the bloom. Synonyms: flower, bud, blossom    2. in bloom 3. verb When a plant or tree blooms, it produces flowers. When a flower blooms, it opens. This plant blooms between May and June.  Synonyms: flower, blossom, open, bud    What about these distinctions between the words?  The Scrabble score for each of these words: blossom is 61 points - blossoming is 65 points bloom is 9 points - blooming is 63 points flower is 12 points - flowering is 66 points Our fantasy flowers in bloom today are lilies.

Earth - Bare or Not Bare

I was just reading a post from the Middle-Sized Garden blog.  It was on creating a terrarium.  The workshop leader says there is no bare earth in nature.  It is all covered.  So one covers the bare earth in the terrarium. Doing a little searching, I find this: "There are really only two big patches of intact forest left on Earth, the Amazon and the Congo, and they shine out like eyes from the centre of the map," lead author Nick Haddad, a professor at North Carolina State University, told the New Yorker.  The article in the UK Independent examined the negative impact of roads in forests. I haven't found anything on whether there is naturally occurring bare earth/dirt.  Instead the articles are on the notion of bare feet - bare earth - of 'grounding' - walking with bare feet in nature.  The alive.com article discussion is about the bioelectrical nature of our bodies and the role of the earth's energy in our well-being.  "Getting grounded - coming back into contact with the surface of the earth." Here are two of Grimsby's pretty gardens - the first one seems like a doll's house - always decorated in pretty pinks with lush plantings, and the second a sophisticated romantic garden.

Who's Seen You!

On the Owl Tour we all wanted to see the owls - we saw some and didn't see every single one in their homes.  They all saw us, though.  Our guide told us that we've each been seen by hundreds of owls in the wild.   I got to wondering about cars.  Where are cars going?  We're told to follow Tesla, Google, Apple and Amazon rather than GM, Ford or Toyota on the future of cars. We know about driverless cars, as they are being tested now. So there won't likely be 'tests' for driving skill.  Could we have 3D printed cars? The prediction is that this is possible and in 20 years will be used at F1 races for replacement parts. A big question is fuel - the best possibility is the electric powered car. Car connectivity will happen with 'vehicle -to-vehicle' and vehicle-to-infrastructre' communication providing real-time vehicle data. Car ownership is expected to diminish and car access to become the normal approach. And there we have it.  All those driveways in front of residential homes will be rendered obsolete.  More room for gardens!

The Feelings of Flowers

"Perfumes are the feelings of flowers."  -  Heinrich Heine September is when my garden is filled with Sweet Autumn Clematis - little white stars climbing up trees and bushes.  It is a haven for pollinators so there is a buzz of sound.  The scent is sweet and citrusy and is everywhere.   It reminds one of May and the scent of apple blossoms and hyacinths.  And then we see a red leaf and know this is the finale I saw red leaves yesterday climbing up poles and tree trunks.  I am curious whether they are poison ivy or virginnia creeper.  My own garden vriginnia creeper is not turning red yet.  So it might be the abundant poison ivy of Niagara that is the first to turn colour.   How to know which it is?  The expression to remember is: Leaves of three?  Let them be!  I didn't stop to check, but kept thinking of the expression. There are more rhyming expressions to help with the identification of poison ivy:  "Longer middle stem; stay away from them." -- the middle leaflet has a long stem while the two side leaflets attach almost directly. "Ragged rope, don't be a dope!" Poison ivy vines on trees have a furry, "raggy" or ragged appearance. "Berries white, run in fright" and "Berries white, danger in sight." "Red leaflets in the spring, it's a dangerous thing." -- new leaflets sometimes are red in the spring. Later, in the summer, the leaflets are green -- while in autumn they can be reddish-orange. "Side leaflets like mittens, will itch like the dickens." This refers to the shape of some poison ivy leaves, where each of the two side leaflets has a notch that makes the leaflet look like a mitten with a "thumb." (Caution:all parts of the plant can cause itching, not just these leaves.) The latest iPhone was announced - at a notable price.  My own iPhone came in handy on the trip.  It was used for these panorama pictures - the iPhone does it all.  Here are two from the Denver Botanical Garden.  This Victorian conservatory had bird cages hanging inside, each with airplanes in each.

Voyager Sees Us

We looked at the Voyageurs yesterday.  Today we consider it was the 40th anniversary of Voyager 2's journey through our solar system in August. The coverage below is from theatlantic.com. "In August of 1977, the first of two identical robotic probes was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound for our outermost planets and beyond. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have each traveled more than 10 billion miles in the past 40 years, sending back invaluable observations and images. They discovered two dozen new moons, discovered active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io, took a famous “family portrait” of our solar system, and much more. Voyager 1 recently became the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere and enter interstellar space. The Voyagers are also famous for being our most remote emissaries, carrying with them identical “golden records” with images and sounds from Earth. On this 40th anniversary of the first launch, a look back at the still-running Voyager mission follows." Our first picture from Lilycrest Gardens is obvious.  What is our second picture? I've copied it from the article - This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed "Pale Blue Dot," is a part of the first-ever "portrait" of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixels in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun. In 1994, Carl Sagan said of this image: "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."

Lilies and Microwaves

September 5th is  the anniversary of the microwave oven  and it is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  Its history is outlined here.  It was called the "radarange" and the person who made the discovery was Percy Spencer, an engineer with Raytheon.  He was using a magnetron, and melted the candy bar in his front pocket.  Then he pointed it at a raw egg and exploded it.  Then he went for popcorn kernels and popped them up.  Microwaves heat up the water molecules in food.  The article concludes: "But you can't call yourself a real cook unless you've ruined a meal or two in the microwave. As they saying goes, there's no such thing as a mistake in the kitchen, just a new recipe waiting to be born. Think of it as your chance to add a page to the now 50-year-old history of the little electromagnetic box that could." We look at a lovely combination - a Ranunculus and Water Lily at the Denver Botanical Gardens.