Berry-Go-Round #34

Welcome to Berry-Go-Round #34. Here in Northern Utah we’ve just wrapped up an absolutely frigid Thanksgiving weekend. Wind, ice, crusty snow- who’s thinking about plants? Despite the Arctic Blast, the Watcher Family had an enjoyable and adventurous holiday (which I’ll post about later this week) but in truth my main thoughts these last few days were- as they generally are this time of year- oriented around staying warm, eating and drinking. If these same things are on your mind right about now, then this month’s edition has some great posts for you.

Plants You Wear

When the cold sets in, one of the first things I do is scramble around the closet, looking for where I hid all the warm winter clothing. This inevitably leads to the realization that I Have Too Many Damn T-Shirts, because I am- as Awesome Wife is quick to point out-unable to throw any T-shirt away, ever.* Given how much cotton there is clogging up my closet, I was a bit chagrinned that I knew so little about where it comes from. Thankfully, JSK over at Anybody Seen My Focus?** has cured my ignorance, with a helpful 2-part series on cotton-harvesting,

*“But if I throw this one away, how will anyone ever know I ran the Boulder Bolder in 1992?...”

**Best Name for a Blog Ever. Seriously, I totally should have come up with that name.

Plants You Eat

Thanksgiving is probably the only time I regularly consume cranberries (I don’t know why- they’re so good) and though in my long-ago youth I was carted out to a commercial bog as on a school field trip*, I never knew much about where they really came from in the wild. Matt, way up at Sitka Nature (Alaska) takes us along a cranberry foraging hike in the far North.

*All Boston-area school children are at one point or another taken on a cranberry bog field trip, usually somewhere on or near Cape Cod. I don’t know why this is. It’s not like cranberries are this huge part of Massachusetts history or the pillar of the Bay State economy or anything. And I don’t think any of my elementary school classmates actually grew up to be cranberry farmers. I could be wrong about that last part I guess- haven’t really kept in touch.

We did* turkey and lamb for the big feast this year, but the last few years we’ve been alternating between turkey and prime rib. Yes, I know red meat, tread-on-the-land, yada-yada. But it just tastes so good! Anyway, I was particularly pleased to see this submission on Promoting Wildlife in Your Cattle Pasture by Jake over at Texas Ranch Management. Jake posts about the importance of plant diversity on ranches, their role in fostering wildlife, and the resulting benefits to the rancher who’s in it for the long term. (Jake also utilizes one of my favorite blogging tools- the awesome graphic!) Good stuff.

*“did” in this instance means “went into a restaurant in Moab and ordered it...”

Plants You Drink (hic)

Speaking of good stuff, know what’s good with turkey or prime rib? Wine, that’s what. Darcy over at Of Winds and Water posts about making wine, and doing so from one of my favorite berries- Elderberries*. (I also like this post because she manages to make her mom do all the work, and get a post out of it. Nice, Darcy!)

*I’ve blogged about them here, here and here.

Not into wine? Maybe beer is more your thing, or something harder, like whiskey. Either way, you need Barley, whose fascinating 8,000 year history of cultivation is touched upon by Phil* over at A Digital Botanic Garden, as he makes his case for growing your own.

*Who is an actual, Real Life Botanist, and not just a seat-of-pants hack on the web who’s into plants…

On a more serious note, before leaving the agri-sub-theme, Jeremy over at the Agricultural Diversity Weblog touches on some of the very real and tough challenges in “gap-filling” crop genebanks.

Blooming Things!

While it’s fun to think about how plants make possible the clothing, food and drink that get us through the winter, what I really miss this time of year is plants blooming. The really wonderful thing about a blog carnival is the chance to see what’s going on far, far away. This month the Phytophactor and Neotropical Savanna deliver.

The Phytophactor has produced a spectacular series of posts from his ongoing field work in Costa Rica, including not just lovely orchids, but flowers every bit as stunning from everything from the Coffee Family, to… wait for it… the Bean Family!

And down in Panama, Mary at A Neotropical Savanna has done one of my favorite kinds of plant posts: that mysterious tree in the back yard that turns out to have a Way Cool story. I won’t give it away, but it’ll change how you think about the Sunflower Family…

Your Opinion?

Tangent: While we’re on the topic of Central America- I welcome your input. I’m planning on attending a Spanish language school early next year in Central America, followed, ideally, by some backcountry hiking, botany and exploration. Right now I’m torn between Panama and Nicaragua. Nicaragua (toward which I’m slightly leaning) seems a bit less spoiled by development and tourism, and also is home to some fabulous volcanoes, cloud forests and lakes. Panama appears to have, if anything, even greater biodiversity, and perhaps beats(?) Nicaragua in terms of lowland tropical forest. Any opinions?

Before leaving wildflowers, a nice post from Keith over at Get Your Botany On about Deptford Pink. Keith’s post includes an actual 3-verse Limerick* about this lovely weed!

*I’m embarrassed to admit that for many years, the only limericks I knew were naughty ones. Even now, when someone points me to a limerick, I get a little nervous. Rest assured, Keith’s limerick is G-rated and delightful!

Plants That Make Us Think

I have a soft spot for willows; my very first post about a plant ever was about them at the very onset of spring. Now Dave over at Osage & Orange has a wonderful post about willows at end of autumn, that reminds us of something I’ve always loved about plants: sometimes we see a little of ourselves in them.

To conclude this month’s edition, I’ll point you to a wonderful 3-part series over at my favorite blog, Foothill Fancies. Sally’s posts- Plants Die, Stuff Plants Do, and Do Sleeping Plants Dream?* - rejoice in the wonder, mystery and utter fantabulous-ness of plants, providing food for thoughts, dreams and hopes through the long winter ahead and planting seeds in our souls of the spring to come.

*BTW, I have a “theory” that I dream more, or rather remember more dreams, in winter. I think this is because I wake up, look outside and go back to sleep more often, and the interrupted morning sleep makes me remember more of my dreams. BTW, if you watch TV before bed, be careful what you watch. Two nights ago I learned that my freshman-year college dorm room would’ve have made a lousy anti-zombie safehouse. Dreams are weird.

That wraps it up for Berry-Go-Round #34. Thanks to all of you who submitted posts. Join us again for next month’s edition (#35), to be hosted at An Accidental Botanist. Stay warm, and think green.

Berry Go Round #13: Winter-Tough

This edition of Berry Go Round is dedicated to Karl Ramjohn and Floyd Lucas, who died at sea earlier this month. Karl and Floyd were the brother and brother-in-law respectively of Ian Ramjohn, a biologist, plant blogger/enthusiast and early supporter of this carnival. Ian, we are sorry for your loss, and wish you and your family the best in this terrible time.

This month’s Berry Go Round finds us Northerners in the heart of winter, and in this time of year the aspect of plants that strikes me the most is their sheer toughness, durability and longevity, and these aspects are the focus of many of the posts in this month’s edition.

Special Note to Readers Of This Blog Who Are Not Really Into Plants: What? You’re still not into plants? Check out this great video over at LovePlantLife. Nothing technical, no Latin, just cool stuff about plants.

Here in the Great Basin, we like to think we hold the proud record for longevity with our Bristlecone Pines, but Dr. A over at The Phytofactor calls our attention to a durable Norway Spruce in Sweden, which at an estimated 9,550 years old (pic left), is nearly twice as old our most ancient P. longaeva. Dr. A follows this up by bringing us up to speed on the most ancient tree of all, which 385 million years ago was forming the very first forests.

The toughness of plants is nowhere clearer than on rockglaciers as David shows us at Cryology & Co. His fascinating post features members of diverse genera from Cerastrium (pic left, a weedy genus of the Carnation family) to Huperzia (pic right, a Lycophyte, and close cousin of the clubmosses.) (David’s post also highlights some wonderful lichens. While not strictly plants, lichens are really “plants-plus” with their wonderful symbiosis of fungi and green algae or cyanobacteria, and certainly merit the interest and admiration of plant lovers everywhere.)

But perhaps the most impressive winter survivors are the Bryophytes, or mosses, whose splashes of green make such wonderful islands of color in winter forests. Jessica at Moss Plants and More provides a great overview of why this is, and just what exactly is going on with moss in the dead of winter.

Back in the Great Basin, Desert Survivor highlights another “tough” plant- and my personal, all-time favorite monocot- the otherworldly Joshua tree, while indulging in that favorite past-time of all us Great Basin residents: The Mojave Winter Getaway! Another fascinating aspect of Joshua trees, which I blogged about last May, is that they’re dependent on a single species of pollinator- a monolectic moth. (I love this photo of hers- Joshuas on the ridge with a low-lying inversion in the background; a classic Basin-and-Range-in-Winter shot.) Just yesterday she followed up with this broader-ranging post on the survival strategies of desert plants.

Plants that survive- like the Joshua tree- by way of a single pollinator are endlessly fascinating, linked to the world of life by a single thread as it were, and Laurent at SeedsAside introduces us to a fascinating example, Macaranga tanarius, whose sole pollinator, a vegetarian beetle (pic right), seems to have somehow evolved into its role out of a family of strict predators. But Laurent’s even more amazing pollination post this month concerns the flowers of Epipactis helleborine (pic left), which not only rewards its pollinators, but apparently addicts them to its narcotic nectar!

If you’re a relative newcomer to the world of plants, and a bit intimidated by all this Latin bouncing around, Sally at Foothills Fancies posts a well-grounded reminder not to take classification (or ourselves) too seriously, lest we get bogged down in the phylogeny and fail to see the … well, I guess “forest for the trees” actually works in this case, and focus on enjoying the plants all around us. (I wish Sally had that post up about a year ago, when I dove into botany; it would’ve eased my mind on many late nights spent scratching my head over funny Latin words…) Sally follows this “Big Picture” post up with the wistful tale of the “orphaning” (“marooning”?) of her old college flame, Sphenopsida.

Returning to the toughness of plants, here at Watching the World Wake Up we’ve looked at a couple more Utah trees this past month, Limber Pine and Utah Juniper, and how they deal with our heavy mountain snows and chilling valley inversions here in the Great Basin.

But lest we get too proud of our tough plants, Gravity’s Rainbow Extinction Thursday series reminds us of wonderful plants we’ve lost, and the many others we’re so close to losing. And the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog updates us this month on challenges to biodiversity in the growing things we eat from Kenya to Versailles.

Plants in winter are ultimately about enduring time, until they can grow and reproduce and start the cycle anew. And speaking of time, the issue of just how plants tell time is addressed this month over on the fabulous How Plants Work. (Why didn’t someone tell me about this blog when I was getting into plants?) Tons of great stuff here.

That wraps up this month’s edition of Berry Go Round. Thanks to all of you who submitted posts. Be sure to join us again next month for the February edition of this carnival, to be hosted at Gravity’s Rainbow.

Postscript: I actually only had to reject just one submission for this edition, and only because the plant tie-in was just a bit too weak for this carnival. But the subject- those annoying “Acai Berry” spam emails- caught my eye, and the post is fascinating (though long), so I’ve included the link here.