In the Meantime, Here's Some Devil's Club

When you have a big event, a lot gets done in preparation, but a lot of other things get put aside until after the event.  My daughter's been graduated and my son's been married and now that everyone who came here for the events has left, I'm reviewing what needs to be done in the various facets of my life.

So, in the meantime, I was going to put up some devil's club photos I've taken.  But they really aren't that good.  So, I deleted most of them and settled for a couple that are just barely ok. Sorry, I've got things to do. 

 From an old NPR story:

Devil's club, or Oplopanax horridus, is a plant with an unmistakable presence. It has leaves like palm fronds, spines like daggers and red fruit that's candy for bears. It sticks its long neck out as far south as Oregon, and to the east, has even surprised a few Michigan hikers with its cloak of vicious thorns. But the plant is perhaps most common to the bear, deer and salmon habitats of Alaska's Tongass National Forest.   [Well, we aren't near the Tongass, but we have lots up here in Southcentral Alaska too.]

 "The Tlingit have turned to devil's club for a list of ailments you wouldn't wish on an enemy: from coughs and colds to stomach ulcers, tuberculosis and hypoglycemia. 

Tribe members steep it into teas, mash it into salves, chew, sip and steam it. It's also used to ward off evil. The plant, dubbed the "Tlingit aspirin" has not been approved for medicinal use by the Food and Drug Administration."

From Drugs.com:

"Externally the prickly outer bark sometimes is scraped from the stem, leaving the cambium for use in the preparation of decoctions and poultices; however, others use both the cambium and stem together. Poultices were applied to sores and wounds to prevent or reduce swelling and infection. The cambium sometimes is softened by chewing prior to being placed on a cut or burn as an emergency analgesic and local antiseptic. In many cultures, the plant is believed to possess “magical” powers that impart great strength."

Devil's Club superficially is similar to Cow Parsnip - in the size of the plant and the leaf shape and size.  An older post on cow parsnip compares devil's club and cow parsnip.

Horsetail: One Person's Weed is Another Person's Scouring Pad

Writing for the blog often makes me question things I think I know.  I took these pictures of horse tail at the Helen Louise McDowell Sanctuary, but is that really what it is?  Or just the name we tend to use?  It does seem to be horse tail. 


 
My first stop on the google express got to this at gardenstew:

"I have a weed growing in a bed in my yard (Horsetail). From my research I have found out that this is a very hard thing to get rid of. Unfortunately it has begun to spread in my lawn and into another vegetable bed that I have. I don't want it to get much further, but from what I am reading most weed killers do nothing for this. Has anyone ever dealt with this weed before? Any suggestions? (I have pets and don't want to expose them to anything toxic in my yard.)

Thanks"

 (You can find suggestions for getting rid of horsetail there at gardenstew and also at the UBC botanical garden site.)

But horsetail has beneficial properties too. 

Alaska Herbal Teas tells us:

"Horsetail is edible, but not choice. It must be boiled, as it is toxic raw. Some Athabascans use it as a seasoning. A fluidextract of the sterile stems and ashes from the burnt plant are used for medicine against kidney and bladder trouble, stones, ulcers or wounds in the bowel, and externally on sores. Horsetail has historical uses for cleaning and polishing. Its high silica content makes it good for scouring and soap preparation."

There's overlapping info at  Wikipedia:

The Water Horsetail has historically been used by both Europeans and Native Americans for scouring, sanding, and filing because of the high silica content in the stems. Early spring shoots were eaten. Medically it was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans to stop bleeding and treat kidney ailments, ulcers, and tuberculosis, and by the ancient Chinese to treat superficial visual obstructions. Rootstocks and stems are sometimes eaten by waterfowl. Horsetails absorb heavy metals from the soil, and are often used in bioassays for metals.

According to Carolus Linnaeus, reindeer, which refuse ordinary hay, will eat this horsetail, which is juicy, and that it is cut as fodder in the north of Sweden for cows, with a view to increasing their milk yield, but that horses will not touch it.

Clutter Wars - More Locks and Surprise Hoya Flowers

In March I posted a picture of two Master locks I'd found uncluttering.  I'd always been frustrated with locks with lost combinations.  But this time I googled a way to get the combinations from Google.  (Luni left a comment on that post with links to websites that showed how to crack the locks, but I couldn't make it work.)

As uncluttering continued, more locks showed up until I had six, the most you could get combinations for with one request. 

Not sure what I need six locks for, but I've sent in for the combinations.







And today I discovered how cluttered (or maybe just busy) when I found that our hosta [for some reason it came to me later this is a hoya, not a hosta] plant is now blooming.  How did it get this far along without me even noticing buds?   Well, this is positive neglect. 

Maybe  I've concentrated  too much on the philodendron jungle that's been in there.  This floor pot had vines growing up the wall and then dangling down.  I figured I could clear the floor space for better things by repotting.  So here I've pulled all the vines down and started untangling them and cutting them for repotting. 







I'm not sure I made a wise move, we'll see in a few weeks I guess.  I thought I could cut them at the joints and put them in new soil, build a shelf that got them well off the ground.  The shelf worked, but they are struggling to gain traction. (I found the white pot cleaning out the backyard greenhouse!)

The ones on top are still green after a couple of weeks, but limp.  But nothing as bad as the yellow, curly leaves dangling down on the left. 

We'll see.   I did leave a few in the old pot in case these don't make it.  And we gained a lot of room on the floor. 

We've got visitors headed this way in June so I have motivation to step up the clutter war.  Unlike Afghanistan, this is a war I know, with determination, I can win.  (Well, it never ends, but I can get to a point where it's controllable.)

You Can Feel the February Sunshine

At least inside, the sun has a definite warmth when it touches you.  When I go downstairs every morning to spray the bamboo, bromeliads, and begonias, it's light earlier.  Sunrise today was 9:10 am  and it sets at 5:18 pm (the moon gets four more hours in the sky) for a total of eight hours eight minutes and 55 seconds.   But don't believe everything you read on the internet.  The Anchorage Daily News says sunrise today was 9:09 am (five minutes after their scheduled moonrise).   And when I went on line to get the ADN link, I found the online version gave yet another time for the sunrise. (Note, the ADN link goes to weather in general and probably changes from day to day.)  At least they all agree on sunset time.



I'm not sure how you calculate exact sunrise for a place with mountains to the east.

In any case, here are some pictures of my flock.  

 

Five Uses of Sphagnum Moss at the Alaska Orchid Society

I talked to a colleague I've know a long time yesterday and it turned out she was giving a talk at the Alaska Orchid Society  on sphagnum moss.  So we went last night.  Members had brought their blooming orchids to share. 

Like this spectacular lady's slipper.  From All Sands:

The Lady's Slipper is one of the few flowers which has been named for the shape of its blossom. Cypripedium, the scientific name for this flower, actually means venus slipper in Greek. The common name changes it to Lady's Slipper and with an great deal of imagination one can see how this is applicable. This plant is a species of the orchid family. It requires an acidic soil which is why most are seen in the humus rich areas of oak or pine forest.
Much like the family it comes from, which has an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 members, Lady's Slipper can survive in places from the tropics to the arctic tundra, but the greatest number of these flowers that are not grown in greenhouses exist in the warmer climates.

I don't know what the other two are called, so you don't have to read a bunch about them.  

But then we got down to the serious business of sphagnum moss - a medium often used to grow orchids. 





It was clear pretty quickly that Marilyn's background as a biology professor was going to assure that this was no superficial lecture.  She's been to international conferences on sphagnum moss and tramped all around Alaska identifying them.  

OK, #1 I got.  But after that, shall we say my brain was stretched a bit. 

She did explain these terms and I understand them now a bit, but not enough to try to explain them here. 

Here's a close up of a dried sphagnum moss she had in her collection. 

And another:

So, the question in the title.  I know that's why you're still here.  From Marilyn's talk:

1. Fuel - in the form of peat (not all peat is sphagnum moss we learned.)
2. The smoke from sphagnum moss gave Scot's whiskey its flavor
3. Gives (NH₄)₃SO₄ for fertilizer
4. Used as soil conditioner, acidifier
5. First disposable diaper

She gave us more but you get the point.  It's evenings like this that humble me as I realize again how much I don't know. 

Like, how many kinds of sphagnum moss are there?   150 - 300
And how many grow in Alaska?  38-40

And people like Marilyn can identify many of them.  I'm not even sure I could identify a sphagnum moss from another kind of moss, though she told us how.  But I'd have to go out and look and see if what I understood was as obvious with living moss as she made it out to be. 

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? Turns Out Simon and Garfunkle Were Right

[Audio from 4Shared]

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow
I am a rock
I am an island
[from Piratebay]

This blog's utopian goal is to get people to see things from different perspectives, to get people to question what they know. For me, this morning's interview with Neil Krulwich on NPR's Morning Edition did that.

Rocks aren't alive. Life is.

So think of them as separate. Rocks over here; life over there.

Then along come Robert Hazen and his colleagues with their study, "Mineral Evolution," published in the American Mineralogist and all of a sudden categories shatter. I'm amazed. I hadn't thought of this, even remotely. . .

But life is a great sculptor. One very early form of pond scum figured out how to exhale oxygen into the air, and soon (well, not THAT soon, but soon enough) our atmosphere had enough oxygen to create rust, to combine with organic chemicals to make creatures with shells and bones and those creatures died and became rocks. What is coral but a clump of dead skeletons? Look at the White Cliffs of Dover — that's a heap of dead plankton.  

You can read the whole piece at NPR.  It's mind-blowing as the 20 Questions "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?" categories are obliterated.  And it should remind us that all of our categories are human constructions, our best attempts to make sense of the world we live in.  But hardly "reality."  Just our temporary realities until we find a better way of conceptualizing that aspect of the universe.

We all know that living things need minerals. When you eat a raisin, you are putting iron in your blood. We drink milk to put calcium in our bones. So we need minerals. What I didn't know is that minerals, in some sense, need us. The presence of life on Earth nearly tripled the rock population.

Don't just read it, listen to the Krulwich piece here. He tells it very entertainingly.

Sheep Creek Trail - Skunk Cabbage, Big Trees, New Leaves

We drove down to the end of Thane Road today.  It's maybe ten or twelve miles.  The road north goes 40 miles.  And you can drive a bit on Douglas Island.  And that's it.  The rest is by boat or air.  Sheep Creek Trail goes up from the road.  I'm pretty sure the picture is of skunk cabbage.  I'm not used to seeing it at this stage.  But here's a description from The Nature Institute website by Craig Holdrege:

It's March, the ground is still frozen, and frost comes nearly every night. The days are rapidly getting longer, but the spring equinox is still ahead. Walking through the woods, you see the grey and brown tree trunks, a coloring mirrored in the ground litter of leaves from the previous year. There is no green. Not only the temperature but the whole mood of the woods is cool.

Then you walk down to the edge of a meandering stream or, in my case, to a wooded wetland. Here, too, the ground is frozen, and patches of ice spread between groups of bushes and small trees (mainly red maples and alders) that dominate the wetland. In this still, quiescent world, little centers of emerging life are visible, the first sign of early spring. What I see are the four-to-six-inch-high, hood-like leaves that enclose the flowers of skunk cabbage. . .

Both color and shape are striking. Some leaves are completely deep wine-red or maroon, while in others this background coloring is mottled with patches or stripes of yellow or yellow green.

It's after the equinox and the frost is gone already, but otherwise the description was on the mark.

 

Then back into the car, along the water into town.

An abandoned pier.

Good Mail, Bad Mail: Fair and Festival

I got a good blog related email this week and one not so good.  The good one was from a Juneau Douglas High School student who asked if he could use one of my photos for his science project.  Part of their rules requires that they get permission to use photos and give credit for photos they use on their posters.  He didn't know I was in Juneau and I surprised him when I showed up to see his project. 

Here he is explaining his project where he tested crushed cow parsnip in water as a way to naturally kill mosquito larvae.  I'll do a longer post on the science fair later. 

The other communication wasn't nearly as pleasant.  It was a letter from a San Diego attorney alleging that I had libeled his client and that he was giving me a week to remove the offending post.   While I didn't think there was anything wrong with the post - you regulars know that I'm pretty careful about what I say - I have engaged an attorney.    I can say that the letter caused me to poke around a bit and things get more and more interesting.  I'll put up more soon.  The offending post is this one.

Juneau Keeps Being Beautiful

Each time I go up Basin Road, I go a little further. Here are some pictures from yesterday.

 

  

  

  

  

 

And in front of our place, along the south facing wall, we have tulip leaves showing already.

Bamboo Grows in Juneau

Juneau is NOT Anchorage.  At 61˚ North latitude, Anchorage is north of Stockholm and Olso (both 59˚.)  Juneau is 58˚.  (Belfast and Copenhagen are 54˚, Amsterdam 52˚, London is 51˚, Seattle is 47˚, and New York City is 40˚N.)  We visited an old friend yesterday afternoon and he has bamboo, not just growing, but thriving, in his front yard.  That shouldn't be a shock since bamboo grows in Beijing where it can also get cold in winter.  Being right on the water keeps Juneau temperatures from getting overly hot or overly cold. 

But we Anchorage folk assume that a foot of snow on the ground in January is going to stick around a while.  Well, here's a picture I took our first night, when we'd just gotten into our apartment. 

And here's the same view, today, five days later.

I'm going to do an exploration jog.  We were going to head out to the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, but it turns out that is in the valley, not downtown where we could walk.  Joan has figured out the bus system a bit, but we're not even sure it runs on a holiday.

Winter Green

As I was spraying (nothing evil, just water) some plants this morning, I realized while I put up flower pictures in the summer, I haven't done much here with the indoor plants.  Most of what we have, through  evolution, is very hardy for our dry, neglectful indoor climate.  Given we are gone for periods of time, these are the ones that have proved hardy during periods of drought.  They also survive short winter daylight hours, though we do have some good south facing windows.  We once fussed with lighting, but no longer.

We brought this bromeliad back from my mom's backyard, maybe 15 years ago. It did bloom a few times in the beginning, but not recently. It has nasty thorns and I stick it in the corner and trim the thorns off the tips of the leaves. I think this is less invasive than declawing a cat. I'm not sure what the evolutionary advantage of the thorns is. Perhaps to keep away animals that would eat or otherwise hurt the plant. There aren't any of those in our house, so it shouldn't be a problem.  From the Bromeliad Society International:

Bromeliads are members of a plant family known as Bromeliaceae (bro-meh-lee-AH-say-eye). The family contains over 3000 described species in approximately 56 genera. The most well known bromeliad is the pineapple. The family contains a wide range of plants including some very un-pineapple like members such as Spanish Moss (which is neither Spanish nor a moss). Other members resemble aloes or yuccas while still others look like green, leafy grasses.

In general they are inexpensive, easy to grow, require very little care, and reward the grower with brilliant, long lasting blooms and ornamental foliage. They come in a wide range of sizes from tiny miniatures to giants. They can be grown indoors in cooler climates and can also be used outdoors where temperatures stay above freezing.
Bromeliad History

Bromeliads entered recorded history some 500 years ago when Columbus introduced the pineapple (Ananas comosus) to Spain upon return from his second voyage to the New World in 1493. On that voyage he found it being cultivated by the Carib Indians in the West Indies. Within 50 years this tropical fruit was being cultivated in India and other Old World countries.

[Note:  while they do say "recorded" history, I'm wondering if they checked whether the Incas or other American societies ever wrote anything about bromeliads.]
The one on the left is a much smaller one I brought back this fall from my mom's yard.  It was a victim of the fence building, but it's doing fine now.  







This plant underleaf looks pretty dangerous, and when our kids were little, they stayed clear of it, but really those are soft and fuzzy.  It's a begonia that my mother-in-law had and there are now a lot of folks who have plants that were originally cuttings from that plant. 

It too is extremely hardy, easy to propagate, and it has flowers every year. There just beginning now. When they really open, they'll be pink. And we'll be in Juneau. They last a month or more.



Here's a bit of the stem that kept our kids far from this plant.



In checking out begonias, I think this is a rhizomatous begonia as described on Brad's Begonia World:

Rhizomatous begonias comprise one of the largest if not the largest group of begonias. They are differentiated from the other types of begonias in that they grow from stems (rhizomes) that grow along the surface of the soil. As they grow, the stems put out new roots. There are some semi-upright rhizomatous but even these will fall over and root back to the soil like the other rhizomatous if allowed. There is also a group of rhizomatous that put up upright stems from the creeping rhizome.


Begonia 'Bushmaster'Most rhizomatous begonias are grown for their interesting foliage that comes in various colors and patterns. The majority being shades of green, black, silver and brown. Many also have interesting spirals in the sinus of the leaf or ruffled edges. Nearly all are seasonal bloomers that require a short day period to set blooms, so are late winter to spring blooming. Even though not grown for their flowers, they do put on a spectacular display of blooms during their short bloom season. Except for the few upright types, most rhizomatous begonias make attractive mound shaped plants. Rhizomatous begonias can live in less light than most of the other types so are the best choices for really shady areas. Many also do quite well as ground covers for shady or semi shady areas.

Horticulturally the rhizomatous types are broken up into a couple dozen types based on leaf size and growth. For the purpose of this article, culturally there are four basic types, common type, upright type, upright jointed, and distinctive foliage. Most of the cultural items of this page apply to areas where begonias can be grown outdoors all year. Begonias can be grown outdoors in cold climates but must be brought indoors before frost in the fall.

The philodendron is another hard to kill plant.

While looking up philodendron, I came across this story. It's from the astral world, and since there's not further evidence of more rigorous testing, I think he's reading too much in. But that doesn't negate the possibility that there's more to plants than we think. Maybe the bromeliad appreciates having it's nails clipped.

    The story starts with Cleve Backster of the Cleve Backster School of Lie Detection. It was in 1966 that the curious Backster decided to hook up a polygraph machine to one of his philodendron plants to measure the time it took for water to reach the large leaves. Backster noticed that the plant was measuring what would be excitement in a human subject. He then tried different things with the leaf that had the polygraph electrode attached - even sticking the leaf in a cup of hot coffee. The plant showed no other reactions and even seemed to be getting bored after 15 minutes of testing. [Follow the link for the rest of the experiments.]

The bamboo we drove back from Portland five years ago. It involved getting them inspected and certified to take through Canada and back into the US at the Alaska border. We'd found someone at this rural bamboo nursery outside of Portland from Minnesota and picked varieties that he said grew outside in Minneapolis. But I haven't had the heart to plant them outside. I would say they are surviving, but not thriving. Perhaps this summer I'll plant one outside against the house.

And this is the surviving tamarind. It grew to this point from seed in about three weeks and has stayed like this ever since. The other two plants succumbed to lack of water, even though I was watching pretty closely.



And here's the world outside this cocoon of temperance.