Through my Office Window – August 2020

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The usual birds kept coming to our deck for the water or seed (or both) this month: Mourning Doves

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White-breasted Nuthatch

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Blue Jays

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Carolina Chickadees

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Tufted Titmouse

Carolina Wren

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With occasional visits from American Goldfinches

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Common Grackle

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Downy Woodpecker

The House Finches seemed to be the most frequent visitors to the feeder. Near the beginning of the month we were seeing parents bringing fledglings to the feeder.

And then in recent days there were birds that seemed to be getting adult plumage.

Also - near the end of the month a Chipping Sparrow brought its fledgling to the seed under the feeder. The young bird was still in the mode of waiting to be fed rather than finding its own seed.

And it was voracious – here is the “I’m still hungry” stance!

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Unique Activities for Yesterday:

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More sweet potato sprouts. I found more sprouts on the sweet potatoes in the pantry a couple of days ago and put them in water. And this morning they had roots and tiny leaves! I planted them outside in two places near the other sprout and watered all three. The day lily leaves are beginning to grow rapidly again, and I hope the small sweet potato vines will grow fast enough to not be down in the shade.

3 Free eBooks – August 2020

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The Internet Archive is such a great resource. I’ve been thinking recently about how frustrating it was when I was growing up – getting to the library…finding something in the card catalog then discovering that it wasn’t available. Or going to the ‘Books in Print’ reference and finding a reference to a book that I wanted to get…but then finding the library didn’t have it and didn’t have an easy way to get it. Periodicals were in thick bound volumes….if the library had the publication. Somehow my hours at the library were more frustrating than enlightening. I became aware early on that ‘research’ in the library was not as productive as I wanted it to be. Now we have access to so much via a simple search on the internet; the more challenging problem is checking the validity of the references found.

The items I find on Internet Archive are general books that are dated…but reflect a perspective of the time they were written/created. I tend to look more at the images than read the text….but what a rich experience that level of browsing can be!

Grindon, Leo H. Lancashire – brief historical and descriptive notes. London: Seeley and Co. 1892. Available from Internet Archive here. I gleaned images from the book that depict children…an immigrant mother hunched over her baby, children out and about in wet or cold weather, a dinner hour where a younger girl appears to be barefoot and without a shawl/scarf, and then children working in a cotton factory and glass-blowing. The late 1800s were a time when some children started working early in their teens and worked long hours….enough that it impacted their health (i.e. rickets, lung problems).

Holland, Clive. Things seen in Japan. London: Seeley and Co. 1911. Available from Internet Archive here. Again – I selected pictures that include children. In the first one I noticed the shoes – placed on the ground under the bench…and what about the other child on the bench a little further away. The ‘big sisters’ in the other picture look a little tired…and how did the photographer know that the babies were all ‘little brothers’?

Sakai Hoitsu (Japanese, 1761-1828). The slideshow of this artist’s work is available from Internet Archive here. Do you recognize the deciduous magnolia?

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Unique Activities for Yesterday:

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Watermelon symmetry. I cut the watermelon crosswise and noticed the 6 spirals…3 sets of 2 back-to-back spirals. Even familiar foods can surprise us! Maybe this could be a prompt for a hexagonal Zentangle pattern. Some paintings of watermelons before modern plant breeding show the 6 segments more clearly.

Toad, Tiger Swallowtail and Puffballs

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While my husband mowed the grass this past weekend – I took the compost bucket out to the pile and swept the deck (including the stairs down to ground level). The first surprise was at the compost pile: an American Toad. It blends in with the sticks around the bin.

It’s possible that the toad’s ‘house’ is a cavity under the compost bin since that is where it headed as I tried to get closer. It’s fun to think about the toad being under my daughter’s old turtle sandbox which is about 30 years old and has a great second act as a compost bin/ (maybe)toad home.

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I found a tiger swallowtail carcass amongst the leaves on the deck as I was sweeping. It was missing some parts (like the abdomen), but I saved it for some later photography. I see these butterflies frequently in our yard. The tulip poplar tree is a food plant for their caterpillars, and we have a large one at the edge of the forest.

After I finished sweeping, I noticed a white object – about the side of a tennis ball in the grass my husband had just mowed. When I looked at I more closely I realized it was a puffball. There was a slash in the ‘ball’ and it was disconnected from the ground…damage from the lawnmower probably.

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There was another tiny puffball nearby that was still attached to the ground and an older one that had been slashed earlier or may already released spores.

Back to the Tiger Swallowtail….

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I took close-up picture then got out the jeweler’s loupe to look at the scales.

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The wings were battered (missing pieces, some scales rubbed away) so this was not a newly emerged butterfly when it died. The scales that remain are still vibrant….tiny jewels even after death.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

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Two tiny leaves on the sweet potato. The sweet potato sprout I planted in the front flowerbed now has two tiny leaves. It appears to be getting comfortable in its new place – set to grow rapidly. The trick will be to keep it moist enough during the hot days we have in the forecast for the rest of this week.

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I was checking the plant when I went out to do another round in the yard using the ‘fill the wheelbarrow’ metric. It was a tough hour since my first task was sweeping the driveway. Acorns are hard to sweep into a pile because they roll! And the ones that have been run over by our cars are in pieces that don’t sweep up easily either; the little bit of curve they have seems to help them stick to the surface. I stopped before the wheelbarrow was full this morning…deciding that an hour was enough as the temperature climbed.

Completed “to be continued” Zentangle® Tiles

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Over the past week, I finished all 18 of the “to be continued” Zentangle® tiles that I posted about last Sunday. I used a different color pin for my second pass at each tile so that I could easily tell the part that I added. Most of the time I used patterns that contrasted…but a few times I continued with the same one. All except one were completed in my early morning hour outside on our screened deck. In the mosaic below I’ve included the partial and completed tiles side by side.

I enjoyed this project…and may do it again in a few months. There are other variations I’ve thought of: 1) make a collect of 6 tiles with the same string (a relatively simple one so it is easily duplicated) and then use different patterns to complete them; 2) make a squiggled string with a lot of spaces on 5 tiles (not identical) and pick 2-3 patterns to use on all of them…..I’m sure others will occur to me. But I still enjoy making just one tile at a time without any plan for what the next one will be like. One ‘project’ a month is more than enough!

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

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Melons. We have 2 melons from this week’s CSA share – a cantaloupe and a watermelon. I was relieved that the watermelon was not huge since my refrigerator was already very full. The cantaloupe was the first to be cut. I enjoyed the first bites while I worked.

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 22, 2020

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Scientists Awaken Deep Sea Bacteria After 100 Million Years | The Scientist Magazine® - Learning more about the durability of microbes in extreme conditions….and thinking about how we look for life elsewhere.

How Ancient Monsoons and Tectonic Shifts Shaped This Flowering Mountain Hotspot | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – China’s Hengduan Mountains….a lot of rhododendrons and delphiniums

Idol of the Painted Temple - Archaeology Magazine – Pachacamac in Southern Peru…a place venerated even before the Inca Empire

5,000 Pythons Reportedly Removed from Everglades Ecosystem – A lot of pythons…but still more need to be removed.

How lockdown may have changed your personality - BBC Future – It might not have changed very much or permanently for most people. Most of us are resiliently adapting to lockdown…we’ll bounce back or continue the aspects we developed during this ‘timeout’ that are positive.

Alaska’s Vegetation is Changing Dramatically – The impact is still to be determined but rapid changes are rarely good for ecosystems….they decline because they can’t adjust fast enough to the rate of change.

Bees' buzz is more powerful for pollination, than for defense or flight -- ScienceDaily – There is not just one kind of buzz! And some bees (like honey bees) don’t buzz flowers at all.

Top 25 Birds of the Week: Raptors  - The birds of prey…some are powerful looking, some are cute, some a ugly…but that’s just overlaying our stereotyping onto birds like we do with other people.

Why Plastic Waste is an ideal building material – We need a strategy to upcycle all the waste plastic that is accumulating since we don’t seem to be able to wean ourselves from plastic packaging at all.

Grand Canyon's Prehistoric Past Appears In 313-Million-Year-Old Tracks -  Sandstone rockfalls….near the trail…first spotted by a Norwegian geology professor on a field trip to the Grand Canyon with his students.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Clothes dryer working. Our 20-year-old clothes dryer has a new heating element and the dust/lint has been cleaned out from around the innards. The first loads we did were towels!

Doe and 2 fawns in our back yard. My husband noticed the deer in our back yard in the afternoon. They stayed around long enough for me to get some pictures. In past years we’ve had a doe and 2 fawns in our yard more frequently. This year their main path back into the forest must be through another yard because we haven’t seen them as often…and so it is a special day when we do.

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The fawns are good size now, but their spots are still noticeable…not quite as well defined as earlier in the season.

Sunrise – August 2020

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It’s getting easier and easier to be up for sunrise. I was still a bit lazy this week and opted to photograph the sunrise from my front porch rather than getting in the car to find a place with a clearer view of the horizon. There are still plenty of leaves on the trees that block out any low view of the sun coming up in our neighborhood; a few clouds are required to see any color. It was a good view with the pink and orange wisps….and sky-blue background. Seeing a beautiful sunrise is always a good start to the day.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

3 glass jars of flowers in the window. I am enjoying the kombucha jars reused as vases for flowers cut at the CSA; each one is a good size to hold 2-3 flowers. I have three on the windowsill in my office. The flowers in the center vase are a week old…the other two are from this week’s walk in the cutting garden (I also snipped catnip, stevia, and basil).

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In the afternoon I took pictures when the sun was shining on the flowers…a little artsy photography. I sat far back in the office, rested the camera on my knee and zoomed in to get the pictures I wanted. Using the zoom rather than getting close to the subject captures more depth of field…and often gives a ‘painterly’ blurring that I like.

Hibiscus. I couldn’t resist stopping to photograph some yellow hibiscus in one of the beds to the side of one of the CSA barns. There are lots of buds on the plants - so we have a few more weeks of these flowers to enjoy. I’ll have to remember to look every week when I get my CSA share.

Planting a Sweet Potato Sprout

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The sweet potato sprout that I found on a potato in the bin a few days ago, grew roots very rapidly…about 2 inches in 3 days.

I took it out to the front flower bed where the day lilies are just beginning to grow fresh leaves again…choosing a place that looked to be between those plants. There were still lumpy roots when I dug the hole (day lily roots) but I tried to push them to the side. The sweet potato sprout has one tiny leaf at this point. I’ll let it grow until the weather starts to get too cool. There probably is not enough time for potatoes to form but maybe there will be enough leaves to make a good salad.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Rain at sunrise. It was raining for my normal 6-7 AM time out on the covered deck. The rain lasted longer than was forecast and the temperature was a bit lower as well. I stayed out for my usual time – enjoying my morning caffeine…making some Zentangle tiles…doing a little reading…listening to birds. The cat came out but decided it was not a good situation for napping; he went back inside within 10 minutes.

Cicada!

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I found a cicada on a sycamore leaf in our yard and carried it to the steps of our deck before continuing to trim the low branches of the tree. By the time I came back to photograph the insect it was walking around the steps…no longer on its ‘sit upon’ leaf. Fortunately, is stayed around long enough for a few pictures.

Comparing the pictures to various species of cicada’s in Maryland, I think it is probably a swamp/morning cicada. I’ve seen this type before in our area…and its supposedly widespread in the eastern US.

Hearing cicadas somehow reminds me of my childhood trips in the summer to my grandparents’ house where we spend a lot of time outdoors – under the shade of the big trees (elms mostly….that were dying or dead by the time I was in my late teens). I don’t remember seeing cicadas then but remember the sound. The sounds are still more evident so seeing one (and being able to photograph it) makes the day a special one.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Yard work…it never seems to be completely done. I’ve come to appreciate the wheelbarrow as a metric and a step (and back) saver. Tree trimming fills it up fast. I was focused on cutting branches that were growing low enough to be in our way we mow the grass. This was my first 2-wheelbarrows full yard work hours!

I took a few pictures in between loads. There seemed to be a lot of small mushrooms in the grass that were all in about the same stage of development.

I couldn’t resist photographing the sycamore leaves…the ones with holes and the ones that were still tiny enough to be unmarked. The tree is already beginning to show some signs of fall; it is late to leaf out in the spring and early to begin changing color…before ‘fall’ starts for other trees.

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There are chives growing in the chaos garden! I’ll have to remember to cut some next time I want to add flavor to a salad.

30 Years Ago – August 1990

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30 years ago – in August 1990 – my daughter and her cousin were getting close to being a year old. My sister’s family traveled from Texas to Maryland so that the girls could spend time together. Both babies were cruising…but not walking yet. We planned outings that they seemed to enjoy. At the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum the babies interacted with each other as well as their surroundings. They were wheeled around in strollers.

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At Brookside, they rode in back packs – taking in the sights and sounds of the gardens.

They enjoyed homemade elephant shaped cookies for a special treat.

After our company left, it was still a busy month with me getting ready to go back to full time work. We bought a new car for me – a Honda Accord – that we owned for long enough that my daughter remembers it.

My parents in Texas were in the process of moving to a new house…trying to get it done before my mother started the school year (teaching middle school).

As I looked at the pictures and read my notes about the month – it was obvious that we were adjusting…getting more acclimated to what it was going to be like with me putting in more hours at work. It still was not easy. I was missing spending as much time with my daughter and my husband was figuring out ways he could help more. We were both experimenting with new routines…but realizing that we’d made positive changes since July.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Sweet Potato Sprout. I found a sweet potato sprouting in my pantry…and broke off the sprout before cooking the potato. The first picture is the way it looked on the day I put it in water….2 days later it has roots! I am going to wait until it has a green leaf before planting it out in a cleared place in the front flower bed. It won’t have enough time to make sweet potatoes before frost, but I should get some tender salad greens (leaves and soft stems)!

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 15, 2020

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Top 25 birds of the week: #Spectacular - Wild Bird Revolution and Top 25 birds of the week: #August - Wild Bird Revolution – A double dose of bird pictures for this week!

A New Look at Ancient Nubia - Archaeology Magazine – South of Egypt….evidence of sophisticated culture centuries before the pharaohs extended their rule to the area.

New fabric could help keep you cool in the summer, even without A/C -- ScienceDaily – Interesting. But are there some negatives to ‘nanofibrous membranes’? Could they be worse pollutants than microplastics if we aren’t careful with them?

Photography in The National Parks: Gearing Up, Staying Safe, And Getting Back Out There with My Cameras at Crater Lake National Park  - I’m still not confident enough to try a road trip to a national park when I am still carefully timing my trips to the grocery store! I’d have to purchase a lot more masks than I have now --- and develop a strategy for ‘rest’ stops along the way.   

Older adults coped with pandemic best, study reveals -- ScienceDaily – This study seems intuitive to me. My husband and I are in the over 65 crowd and post-career. We miss volunteering and traveling…but we are not anxious about a job or childcare or facing financial catastrophe. 2020 is a going to be an odd year for us…but not a bad one. It’s not hard to laugh about not knowing when we’ll get a haircut!

Activities Discovered for Some Inactive Drug Ingredients | The Scientist Magazine® - There is more than the drug in the capsule….and it’s hard to know how many ‘side effects’ to drugs are actually a reaction to something that was supposed to be inert – but isn’t for everyone.

The Weird, Wondrous and Vulnerable American Horseshoe Crab – Cool Green Science – Blue bloods…and ancient…. Can they survive their interaction with humans?

Forty percent of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by targeting 12 risk factors throughout life -- ScienceDaily – There 9 risk factors identified in 2017 (less education in early life; mid-life hearing loss/hypertension/obesity; later life smoking/depression/social isolation/physical inactivity/diabetes) and now there are 3 being added: excessive alcohol intake, head injury in mid-life, and air pollution in later life.

Forest Photos Captured in Different Seasons Shows the Beauty of Change – Interesting idea of a long-term photography project. I’ll have to start scouting some places easy for me to get to.

Childhood connection to nature has many benefits but is not universally positive, finds review: A connection to nature is complex, as well as positive emotions, it can generate negative emotions linked to issues like climate change -- ScienceDaily – But those negative emotions can lead to actions toward a more livable world….which would net to a positive in the long run.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Cicada on the Screen. There don’t seem to be as many cicadas around this year. I hear one occasionally…but no answering song. I hope they are finding mates but would be more confident if there were the usual overlapping songs. There was one on the screen of our covered deck in the early morning. It must have spent the night there and it was not quite warm enough for it to be singing. Later in the day it was gone.

CSA Bounty – August 2020

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We are certainly in the thick of summer bounty from our Community Supported Agriculture. This past week there were three kinds of tomatoes (cherry, heirloom, slicers) and two kinds of peppers (bell and hot…and there were 3 different kinds of hot ones to choose from).  I liked the choices for onions and cabbage too – I always get the more colorful ones. There is just enough leafy green for a salad or two. The zucchini squashes are still coming…and the carrots are large and wonderful. I got some huge beets as my choice from the ‘extra’ crates. I was glad that the bins of watermelons were near the parking since they were 30-35 pounds!

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I got some snippets of basil from the cutting garden

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Along with some flowers. One of the vases I am using for flowers this week is a glass bottle from store-bought kombucha. The label peeled off easily enough and it is a great size for 1-3 flowers. I’m going to save the bottles from now on…line them up on windowsills or group then together on a table…filled with flowers.

Paintings of Flowers Indoors

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I’ve been continuing my trek through painting slideshows on Internet Archive this month and picked painting of flowers brought indoors for this blog post. The artists painted more that just pictures like these but these types of pictures always appeal to me: the flowers themselves, the different kinds of containers, the other parts of the scene (if any), the different styles of the artists…..

The artist name/link goes to the slideshow to see more of their work. Enjoy these images…and take a look at the other paintings from these artists.

Wayne Thiebaud ( American, 1920 - )

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Milkweed Bugs

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I am waiting for the milkweed bugs to mature and fly away from one of the last milkweed plants standing in the flowerbed. They have been transitioning to adult form over the past few days. I’ve been taking pictures when I first start my hour of working in the flowerbeds. On the 8th I noticed a few adults – but still a lot of nymphs.

On the 9th there were fewer nymphs and it appeared that some had just made the last molt to become adults.

On the 10th…more were making the transition – shedding for the last time. The blobs of clear ‘skin’ with black squiggles are the sheds.

By the 11th it appeared that they had all become adults. They’ll fly away to look for fresh milkweed and I hope they find it at the pond where the milkweed looks great – unlike the stalks that I am now cutting down when I don’t see any caterpillars or milkweed bugs on them!

After photographing the milkweed bugs, I get busy cleaning out flower beds (and trimming bushes. I takes me about an hour to fill the wheelbarrow, take the load back to the edge of the forest, and plan the work I want to do the next morning.

On the 11th I took a few pictures after I was done with the gardening of small things in our yard…a bit a nature before I went inside to stay cool the rest of the day.

Neighborhood Pond – August 2020

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My goal was to get to the neighborhood pond before sunrise so I left the house shortly after 6 AM and walked briskly down the street taking only one picture along the way and walking through a spider web that bridged the sidewalk between a mailbox and a small tree. I never saw the web but was brushing off the spider silk for the rest of the walk to the pond and hoping the spider had made it to a side of the web and wasn’t crawling around on me!

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The pond was quieter than expected. The red-winged blackbirds are no longer defending their territory. There were some crows nearby.

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The grasses are making seeds

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And so are the milkweed. The meadow behind the pond has a good stand of healthy-looking plants…but no evidence of Monarch caterpillars that I could see without wading into the taller vegetation.

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The cattails are maturing. They are expanding all around the pond…still a lot of young plants that haven’t made seed pods this year but provide plenty of cover for frogs and birds.

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I heard the calls of green frogs and saw a few in the water…lumps with bulging eyes.

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There was a green heron that was difficult to photograph through the vapor coming up from the surface of the pond. I saw one last month at the pond as well…maybe the same one. It would be great to have a resident green heron at the pond. There was one several years ago as well.

I didn’t see the painted turtle…hope it is still around.

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I experimented with different settings as the sun came up….getting reflections and silhouettes. The silhouette image with the color in the sky is probably my favorite image of the morning.

There were more sounds on my way back to the house…the neighborhood waking up. I looked at the oaks in our neighborhood. Some don’t look so good. Our oak tree seems OK even though it has a rough time with the cold weather in late spring.

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The morning sunlight shows off the fall color already developing in its leaves…although they aren’t falling yet like some of the other trees are….and it doesn’t have a lot of dead branches either…a sign that it is a healthy tree.

5 Months in COVID-19 Pandemic

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August 12th will be the 5th month since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic. I started a monthly post taking stock of the impact on day to day life last month (see July post here). In this month we had 2 household maintenance appointments which we handled by requiring masks and then wiping down surfaces after the maintenance person left. The first one was seasonal check of the air conditioning/heating that we had delayed from late May. The equipment was inspected, and we got a new filter installed.  The second one was the repair of the clothes dryer…which will be next Saturday. If it is the heater element is should be a quick repair.

Maryland has a relatively low rate of infections…but not enough to open schools (they are virtual…hopefully the prep that has happened this summer pays off)…there is still a mask mandate too. I am glad that when I go to the grocery store and the Community Supported Agriculture pick up – everyone is wearing a mask. It is concerning that the state has had a slight uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations recently.

Every time there is an opportunity in the community or for volunteering (and there have not been very many of them) – my husband and I talk about it and have – so far – decided against. Our social interactions on limited to each other and virtual.

During this 5th month, I enjoyed quite a few webinars on a variety of topics (regenerative landscaping, moths, bats, pandemic and climate change, NOAA sanctuaries, microplastics, the power of individual choice) and watching the recently released 2nd season of The Umbrella Academy.

I’ve recently increased my outdoor time from 1 hour per day to 2 hours….generally from 6:30 – 8:30 AM. We’ll see how long that continues. There is a lot to do around the yard; maybe I’ll finally get it in shape during the 6th month of the pandemic!

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

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Escher prints on Internet Archive. There is a collection of 279 images by Maurits Cornelis Escher on Internet Archive. I’ve been intrigued by his work for a long time; this is the largest number of prints I’ve seen in one place! It includes one that I bought as a poster and framed: a fish in a flooded forest. The butterflies/moths were new to me….a clever geometric shape with natural forms.

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Office bouquet. The flowers I cut at the CSA this week are holding up well. I am noticing that they are using a lot of water. I’ve already put more water in the vase twice.

eBotanical Prints – July 2020

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22 botanical eBooks found in July 2020! The volumes are all freely available on the Internet. The whole list of 1,942 books can be accessed here. Sample images and links for the 22 new ones are provided below. (click on the sample image to see a larger view). Enjoy!

Icones selectae plantarum quas in systemate universali ex herbariis parisiensibus, praesertim ex Lessertiano V4 * Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de; Turpin, PJF; Delessert, Benjamin * sample image * 1839

Icones selectae plantarum quas in systemate universali ex herbariis parisiensibus, praesertim ex Lessertiano V5 * Candolle, Augustin Pyramus de; Turpin, PJF; Delessert, Benjamin * sample image * 1846

Drawing of Plants collected at Cape Town * Wehdemann, Clemenz Heinrich * sample image * 1817

Iconographie des orchidées du Brésil : dessings originaux * Rodrigues, Joao Barbosa * sample image * 1869

Our South African flora = Ons Suid-Afrikaanse plantegroei * Compton, R. H. * sample image * 1900

Plantae mattogrossenses, ou, relação de plantas novas : colhidas, classificadas e desengadas * Rodrigues, Joao Barbosa * sample image * 1898

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1966 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1966

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1947 (June-December) * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1947

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1969 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1969

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1981 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1981

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1975 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1975

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1964 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1964

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1974 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1974

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1971 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1971

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1980 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1980

Saguaroland Bulletin - 1967 * Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society; Desert Botanical Garden * sample image * 1967

Iconographie descriptive des cactees * Lemaire, Charles Antoine * sample image * 1841

Les plantes grasses autre que les cactees * Lemaire, Charles Antoine * sample image * 1819

L'Amérique Centrale. Recherches sur sa flora et sa géographie physique * Orsted, Anders Sandoe * sample image * 1863

Frilands-traevaexten i Danmark : veiledning til kundskab om de traeer og buske, som kunne dyrkes i friland in Danmark  * Orsted, Anders Sanoe * sample image * 1864

Le jardin du Roy tres chrestien, Loys XIII, Roy de France et de Navare * Vallet, Pierre * sample image * 1623

Useful knowledge: or a familiar account of the various productions of nature, mineral, vegetable, and animal, which are chiefly employed for the use of man Vol II Vegetables * Bingley, William * sample image * 1821

Some of the Saguaroland Bulletins are included in this group; they are not strictly botanical but do have some good images (and I was savoring memories of visiting the Desert Botanical Garden in recent year when my daughter was doing her graduate work in Tucson). There is also a very early botanical book in this group: Pierre Vallet’s Le jardin du Roy tres chrestien, Loys XIII, Roy de France et de Navare published in 1623.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

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2 tiles. I created to Zentangle tiles during my early morning hour on the deck as usual. For some reason they both appealed to me more than usual…and for different reasons. I was thinking ‘solar prominence’ as I finished up the first one.

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The second one only took 9 minutes to make but I’m already thinking of making more tiles with the same string.

Clean Birdbath. I saved the scrubbing of the bird bath until the end of my hour cutting day lily leaves in the front flower bed. The glass held the grunge (biofilm?) when I dumped the accumulated rain water.

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The spray got some off and then the scrubbing with an old dishrag got the rest.  There is something very satisfying about a clean birdbath…with and without water…but of course the water is what it’s all about! I’ve always liked this birdbath – carefully taking it indoors before the first frost and not bringing it out again until after the frosts are over. I bought it during a sale of seasonal things at the grocery store years ago. The stand stays out and has gradually become more buried in the mulch of the flowerbed.

Dryer broken. Aargh! Our dryer stopped working. It’s probably the heating element since we’ve had the problem before, and the tumbler part of the dryer is still functioning. My husband keeps excellent records and discovered that the element was replaced in 2006. We were able to get an appointment for a maintenance person to replace it in 7 days. Fortunately – it was sheets and not the load of towels that was in the washer when we discovered the problem. I draped plastic table clothes over the loft railing….and draped the sheets over that (and the shower rod). The house looks odd but we’re the only ones here and are relieved that we don’t have to find a laundry place or figure out how to create a clothesline on the covered deck! We were only discombobulated for about 10 minutes and now we are back to our regular Saturday activities. It’s a good indication of how resilient we are at this point!

Gleanings of the Week Ending August 8, 2020

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Performance of the Year | The Prairie Ecologist – Video of an Eastern Hognose Snake pretending to be dangerous.

Millennia-Old Rock Art in Israel Offers Window into Lost Culture | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine – Monuments 4,000 years old…dolmens. There are more than 400 in the same area. A survey of them started 2012 after the first rock art engravings were discovered (14 trident-like shapes on the ceiling of a large dolmen).

Backyard Birding in Central India to Beat Lockdown – Backyard birding - something that is happening around the world during the pandemic!

Granite tors evidence of ice-free Alaska - The Field - AGU Blogosphere – Tors mark the Pleistocene pathway that was free of glaciers for plants and animals during the ice age.

Great, Warm Lakes – This is an article from a month ago…I’m just getting around to reading it. The surface temperatures were warmer than usual as of July…in some of the lakes there are areas warmer by more than 4 degrees C (including most of Lake Michigan)!

Restoration of Sicily’s Temple of Zeus Continues - Archaeology Magazine  - A 26-foot-tall sculpture of Atlas dated to the 5th century BC…and there might have been as many as 40 such statues.

Winners of International Photo Contest Celebrate the Art of Movement – Capturing a moment…freezing motion.

Blood-thinner with no bleeding side-effects is here – Still work to be done….the current formulation is filtered out by the kidneys very quickly. It has applicability in artificial lungs (used to bridge the time between lung failure and lung transplantation) currently.

Poor Everglades Nesting Season A Result of Climate Change and Untimely Storms – It appears that 2020 isn’t a good year for roseate spoonbills and wood storks in Florida.

This Medieval Potion Kills Stubborn Bacteria – “Bald’s eyesalve” – garlic, onion, wine, cow bile. It appears to be effective at combating antibiotic resistant bacterial strains…biofilms that are particularly challenging to kill…including diabetic foot infections.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

3 racoons. Our birdfeeder camera made a video of some visitors to our deck just before 2 AM on Wednesday, 8/5: three racoons! They looked smaller than the female that came several times earlier in the summer. Perhaps they were her young….out foraging on their own (maybe she was nearby). They were no more successful than she was getting seed from our squirrel proof birdfeeder! The action started with one up on the deck railing under the feeder and another 2 directly below on the deck floor. The one on the railing comes down almost on top of one that was on the deck floor. The one that was on the deck railing stayed in the video the longest…thoroughly searching under the feeder after going down to the deck floor.

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Sycamore branch. Back on August 2nd I posted about a dead branch in our Sycamore tree (picture on the left). My husband discovered the branch on the ground near the base of the tree when he went out to use the weed eater and it took both of us to pulled it to our brush pile at the edge of the forest. It came down without bringing a lot of other branches with it….a little sooner than I expected but probably brought on by the thunderstorms that have been sweeping through the past few days.

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Yellow wooly bear. My sister sent me a picture of a caterpillar from her garden in Carrollton, Texas. It appears to be a yellow wooly bear that becomes a Virginian Tiger Moth. Evidently, they are common but neither one of us had seen one before.

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Flowers from the Field

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Between the tropical storm and couple of days of thunderstorms/rain there was a sunny day. It was my usual day to pick up the Community Supported Agriculture share…so I felt lucky in the dry weather. The share was highlighted by three melons (cantaloupe, medium sized yellow watermelon, and large red watermelon) and heirloom tomatoes. I appreciated the bunch of basil in the share as well. I walked around to the cutting garden to get some flowers. It was in the 80s which feels hot wearing a mask…but I persevered. I looked for the flowers that were fresh enough for the butterflies to like – waiting for them to move to the next flower before I cut it. Can you find the two tiger swallowtail butterflies in the picture below?

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I had taken a jar with some water in it and the flowers survived the trip home well enough. I might switch to taking a wet paper towel to wrap around them next time. I trimmed off the lower leaves and put them in a vase….am enjoying them in my office this morning.

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They last for at least a week with the cut-flower powder added to the water. I have enjoyed the cut flowers from the CSA occasionally in previous years but this year there are flowers I bring home every week. During this time of spending a lot more time at home – I have honed habits that make that a joyous experience. Finding joy is something that helps me be more resilient to those aspects of the current situation in our country that are not going well.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Thunderstorms. We are having two days of thunderstorms. It was rumbling one morning during the time I usually spend out on the covered deck; I stayed inside and listened to the rain hitting the skylights of our den; the rest of the roof is well enough insulated that the sound is not as obvious in other rooms. It’s not windy so the only warning/watch is for flash flooding. The area was already soggy from the rain associated with Tropical Storm Isaias. On the plus side there are lulls that offer time to plug in my laptop, phone, and iPad to keep them charged.

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During one of the lulls in the early morning – the moisture around the forest was obvious from my office window. And the birds came to the feeder to get a later-than-usual breakfast; this male brought back his whole brood just after I took this picture…more house finches that there are roosts on the feeder and some of them were clearly just learning to fend for themselves.

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Flowers End

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Cut flowers only last a week or two. Sometimes they dry and retain a more subtle beauty. They are fragile. I’m going to make up a dry vase of flowers that have made it to this state. They could last the rest of the season.

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Others collapsed when their stem stops transporting enough water to keep the flower upright.

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I decided to photograph the petals of this flower – in various configurations. The grid is the paper cutter base (I use it to cut Zentangle tiles from light weight cardboard or card stock); the markings are ½ inch.

I got more than I had bargained for when I discovered a small insect on the flower as I took the petals apart. The jeweler’s loupe was close, so I took some pictures of the insect using that magnification…also on the paper cutter base. It appears to be covered with pollen!

These flowers will never produce seeds – which might have been a possibility if they’d stayed on the plant. The ones that don’t dry will go in the compost now…the ones that go into the dry flower arrangement will be enjoyed a little longer.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Ohara Koson art. Internet Archive has a collection of 185 of his prints available here. I picked several of my favorites from the collection to include here as samples. He was a Japanese artist active in the late 1800s/early 1900s. A little art….every day.

The Umbrella Academy. My husband and I are enjoying the new season of the series. We limit ourselves to 2 episodes per day to make the activity last a little longer…add it to the variety of our days rather than binging on it all at once.

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Sunset. I finally looked at pictures taken recently in my camera…and found pictures I took of the sunset the day before the tropical storm came through. Noticing something beautiful toward the end of a day always makes the rest of my day seem better too. A good crescendo isn’t alone, it makes what comes before special too!

Yard Work

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The yard work seems to never be finished. My goal is to spend a morning hour every other day catching up. The front flowed beds are the first phase. The milkweed is looking awful and the day lily leaves need to be cut since they are turning yellow. I learned last year that trimming the day lily leaves back causes the plant to grow fresh leaves that last until frost. It probably reduces the bulb growth underground, but the deer take so many of the flowers that producing more bulbs is not my priority.

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On the first morning, I cut or trimmed the most aphid infested milkweed and about 1/3 of the day lily leaves. I discovered it was slower going since I wanted to leave the black eyed susans (the deer eat them but maybe not quite as much as the day lily flowers).

The second morning, I continued working on the rest of the bed. There were still a lot of day lily leaves to go.

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I use a wheelbarrow as my measure for each day – my goal it to fill it up. It wasn’t that difficult although it was only another 1/3 of the flower bed! I took the load back to the compost pile; it covered the kitchen scraps I had taken out before I started.

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On the way back up the hill, I stopped to photograph some tiny orange fungus in the grass (I’ll check on them in the next few days…see if they become mushrooms) and a moth which I though was a leaf at first.

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And then there were the milkweed bugs on one of the plants that I chose to leave up in the flower bed.

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Now to find a third morning to finish off the work in the flower bed…and move on to the next flowerbed/bush trimming on my list. It won’t be tomorrow since the forecast is for all day rain from Tropical Storm Isaias.

I’m getting more accomplished on the flower beds now that I’ve settled on the wheelbarrow metric and planning to be out for only an hour. I am not an enthusiastic gardener, but I do want the flower beds to look a lot better than they do right now and am psyched to get there an hour at a time. I am hopeful that I’ll get to a point that I can take off an occasional day (or not get too far behind if the weather does not cooperate) in the next few weeks. The other change I’ve made is to wear my river (field trip) boots; they take away my excuse that the foliage it too wet!

We are at home so much right now that there is no excuse to not have the yard it great shape.

Unique Activities for Yesterday:

Watermelon. We ate our first watermelon from the CSA this season. It was small enough to eat in one sitting for my husband and I. It was yellow (rather than red) and had seeds….but we both enjoyed it tremendously. I’d love to get one of the big red melon with seeds that I remember from my childhood but it seems like they aren’t grown very much anymore.