Binomials

"Fate is always against great things" 

                                     Carl Linnaeus

Where would we be if Carl Linnaeus hadn't given us the latin binomial system? Well I guess the term would just be something I had to learn in algebra and promptly forgotten. If I get asked if I speak a different language, I sometimes stammer out nemnoga, or un poco depending on the situation. But really when you think about it, rattling off genus and species on a walk around the garden or through the greehnhouse is speaking a language and sometimes I feel like I know it a bit better than the english version with all it's predicate adjectives and linking verbs to get to the point. 

Carl von Linneaus

I give Linnaeus props, he not only created his own system of science, essentially creating a language that I can understand. But when the beautiful genus Morae was named in honor of the English botanist Robert More, Linnaeus had the balls to change the spelling to Moraea as it was his wifes maiden name.

 Linnaeus seems to have led a pretty good life, following the flowers, living the dream, He went plant exploring extensively, he curated a few different botanical gardens in his lifetime, taught botany, founded the royal academy, took a job as a professor of medicine but decided he liked the garden better so made himself the director of the University Botanical Garden finishing his career as the president, publishes the Species plantarum, essentially a monograph of every described plant in the world in the 1750's. Retires and the king makes him a Knight. What a life!

Iris reticulata

The Iris are starting in now, here is a little phenology chart for the last three months in case you are planning a winter show sometime:

December:

Iris planifolia

January:

 Iris aucheri 'indigo' 

February:

Iris reticulata

Iris hyrcana 'Talish'

                                                                           Iris hyrcana 'Talish'

Linneaus realized that people couldn't really understand plants if everyone was speaking a different language. Of course Linnaeus named the genus Iris for the Greek goddess who carried messages down from Mt. Olympus on a Rainbow. I mean come on, what's not to like about a guy who thought that was a good way to name plants? Creating a language is not something trifle, describing every known plant at the time a pretty big task, but calling the Iris an Iris, well that's just brilliant. 

Language is so important because as I've come to observe, the digital age has made us all really bad at communication. In this day of emails, texts, awkward pauses and interruptions on teams and zoom and emojis, it can be hard to pick up what inflection someone is trying to get across. For someone who relishes his hands in the dirt, his head in the sun, and whose best times have been spent pulling weeds in many a fine garden, spending this past year behind a computer screen trying to learn a whole new digital language, in a pandemic, navigating the "empty nest", and generally trying to fumble my way through a remote office culture. It has made me realize that life is really pretty short and chasing dreams is something that we should never give up. I read about people like Linnaeus who kept moving through life to get to where they found happiness. If you don't like being a professor of medicine, go be a director of the botanical garden! That should be life's mantra. Clearly he was smart enough to do either, and driven enough to make it happen. You can tell from the quote penned at the beginning it probably didn't come easy, but then again nothing great ever does. I like that there is some humility there. You don't become the inventor of a language and the father of taxonomy overnight. In reading some of his biography, the guy never stopped moving. It's too easy to throw out quotes but the best one here is the rolling stone gathers no moss.

Well I'm off to chase some rainbows as it looks like the bulk of the Juno section is trying to get above ground now. Despite what the groundhog said it's definitely Spring in the illahe, strap in for some fast and furious blogging because the flowers have returned. 

Dense fog and 34 this morning but the afternoon promises sunshine should it burn off. 

Cheers, 

Mark

A New Hope

 This is an important day in US history, the end of the evil reign and the beginning of a new hope. 

I certainly echo the sentiments Mark Twain wrote about Lincoln so long ago:

“This man, in whose heart knowledge and charity had left no room for malice, was marked by Providence as the one to “bind up the Nation’s wounds.”

And now back to the flowers, as I said, I hope to be done with politics for bit, to be able to trust that the elected leader has my safety, interests and freedoms in mind instead of  their own self interest and monetization of the position as that would be a very welcome change and I can get back to not worrying about what damage will be done for future generations like my daughter to sort out, and trust that the leader of the "free" world is in that job to make this world a better place. 

The Warner Mountains

Speaking of distractions, I had a fun trip to the Warner Mountains this past weekend, searching for some backcountry skiing adventure. Didn't find too much snow but had a great time with a special person and had fun taking some pictures of the scenic desolation and soaking in some wonderful hotsprings. Looking forward to going back to explore the wildflower situation soon. 

And now for real, back to the flowers. I wanted to start this year off talking a bit about photography. I'm trying to get better at the art form and since I have so many great subjects to play with I'm having a lot of fun experimenting and self learning in the process. 

So a bit about lighting and how it can change the appearance of a flower. The following pictures are the same plant, both taken last night as the sun was setting. This is Iris reticulata J.S. Dijt. on the greenhouse bench. My greenhouse is oriented North/South so the setting sun plays across the bench and backlights subjects with the greenhouse film providing a nice diffuse light that often will change colors with the setting of the sun. So this time of year I hurry home from work to see if I can catch the last rays of sun and take advantage of that backlight effect. 

What is different about these two photo's is that the one on the bottom has supplemental light provided by an adjustable spectrum LED that I keep on a tripod. This really helps with getting rid of shadows and dark spots on small intricate flowers, but a caveat remains. Clearly you can see the color change in the photo's below:

Iris J.S. Dijt no added light

Iris J.S. Dijt with added light toward the warm end of the spectrum

Keep in mind that neither of these photo's have any color corrections or filters added, I simply held up the LED light a few feet above the plant in the photo on the bottom. Both the camera settings were the same, ISO 200, F/4.0 and a 2 second exposure in the fading light with the camera obviously on a tripod. Both photo's were then uploaded without any editing at all. 

I'm pointing this out because having looked through so many photo's of plants in my day, and falling in love with some plant, I eventually got that plant or seed of it and grew it and found sometimes it doesn't look quite like the picture's I have seen. Knowing you can do a lot with photoshop to change the appearance of a plant is one end of that manipulation scale. But as the photo's above point out, simply the light in a given situation can pretty dramatically change the appearance of a plant. That can change with the conditions of the cloud cover in a given day or with adding supplemental light as I did in the photo's above. While it is sometimes fun to edit photo's to create a masterpiece, sometimes the photo doesn't end up looking at all like the one you took a photo of. Just google Iris J.S. Dijt and you'll see hundreds of photo's of it looking blue and hundreds of photo's of it looking purple. Just depends on what the color temperature was the day the picture was taken. 

Crocus versicolor

A crocus that survived the onslaught of the hungry and devastating vole invasion into the greenhouse is coming into bloom now. 

Finally winter has returned in the evenings but is gone by mid day as we have had temps into the 20's overnight but warm afternoons with lot's of sunshine and temps into the high 50's. Certainly is pushing some of the growth along at a more advanced rate then I would like for the middle of January and knowing that the coldest temps of the year could still be ahead of us. 

Mark

Iris in January

 "The offspring of riches: Pride, Vanity, Ostentation, Arrogance, Tyranny" 

                                                        Mark Twain

Who does that sound like it's describing? To be perfectly clear on the subject, I wanted him hung for trying to destroy the postal service, I think he should have faced a firing squad for separating families at the border, I would have been perfectly ok if they gave him the gas chamber for playing god with all of our lives and denying climate change, or putting Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA. I think we would have been wholly justified in giving him the louisette for his treason against this country with regards to Russia and the way he bent over for Putin anytime he was asked. I think the we could all have enjoyed seeing him drawn and quartered in the streets for the over 3,000 conflicts of interest he used to profit himself and his family, personally destroying the integrity of his post and flagrantly stealing from what is ours as Americans. 

But now, in reality he did himself far worse then those things. Any of those options for death would be an easy way out for number 45. The day a confederate flag was hoisted inside the capital by a murderous mob of white supremicists was the day that his legacy was forever written as it should be told, a vain, rasisct, full of arrogance and wanting to impost tyranny on a land where that will not be tolerated. It speaks a warning of what does lie buried in the soul of this country. Hidden behind it's false evangelical puritanism, the veins of hatred run deep. He will end his days in a federal prison, or even more justice would be dealt if they turn him loose without the secret service protection, his empire crumbling, the vast hotels he built, converted to low income housing, or as a starter housing to the American dream for the immigrants seeking the beacon light of the world. His Golf courses turned into free tent camping for the millions of homeless that his incompetence created.  I hope he lives long enough to see that his empire gets not reduced to ashes but used to build prosperity and a future for all the people that he tried so hard to destroy.  

I look forward to once again not having to think constantly about what peril we will be put in because of tyrannical and fascist leadership. I look forward to once again being able to focus on flowers and the beauty in this world instead of having to look everyday at the pure ugliness and hatred that has been pretending to lead these last four years. 

Happy to see the flowers of winter starting in

Iris hyrcana 'Talish'

I really am looking forward to getting back to the flowers, the heaviness of the past four years have occupied too much of my heart and the tyrant and buffoon stole too much of my energy and time. The flowers are starting and a new spring is coming. A new spring that promises growth and rebuilding, I know we have a long ways to go to get back to being the beacon of hope in the world but we will achieve it and we will smother out every last bit of that hatred that has been breeding these past four years. 

It's rained something close to 6" since this month started. It has been a while since I've seen that much water in a relatively short time. The poor old farmhouse at illahe that has been sinking into the soft, fertile jory soil for 100 years now has a lake underneath it and I had to open the crawl space vents to let the deluge out. The high water table seems to have pushed  the voles out of the tunnels and I've been dealing with some serious critter issues in the bulb house as the crocus have been mowed down to soil level. 

I have some big plans and ambitions for this year, I hope to get that other greenhouse I've been talking about for so long built. I'm working on a project to capture the flower collection via UV flourescence photography. I've got some raised beds to rebuild and renovations to do on the nursery. I'm looking forward to a return to positive, happy times where growth can occur. Stay tuned for a blog that once again is full of bright flowers and hope. 

Mark

What's blooming on the last day of February?

“February - the month of love..?!!
No wonder the shortest one in the calendar.”
― Dinesh Kumar Biran

A quick walk through the garden and greenhouse on the last day of February, of course there is a lot more blooming than this but these made the biggest splash in the little pond. 

Iris reticulata backlit

Fritillaria latakiensis

Fritillaria raddeana

Fritillaria carica

Some grape hyacinths in the rock garden

The weather has been it's usual unpredictable self, it was in the 60's this past week and then the weekend arrived and it decided to spit cold rain from heaven. Lows in the upper 30's last night and quite a bit of rain came down, I'm kind of surprised it didn't snow a bit. I know everyone feels that one week of warm weather in February which you can almost always count on to give people the false sense of spring. But my years of gardening experience have taught me one thing, it's that March can be a a fickle month, prone to outbursts of arctic temperatures often followed by summer like sunshine. Don't think the winter has left quite yet.

Cheers,

Mark

The Late February Spring fever

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

— Margaret Atwood

I smelled like dirt after a Saturday spent turning the vegetable garden under and moving some well composted wood chips. February is just flying by and it's like I  blinked and it feels like 

Spring is here. 

The rock Garden is starting into bloom flower by flower. 

A few Iris reticulata are blooming now in the greenhouse and the garden.

The weather was so great today, sunny and warm and it was actually dry for about 4 days or so this week! The sun and the dirt are like battery rechargers for me. And the best part of the day is just winding down and walking around the garden and seeing all the new things coming into bloom.

Sunny with highs in the upper 50's and lows in the upper 20's. 

Cheers, 

Mark