Category Archives: plants

Greenery

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As promised – some pictures of the plants. I recently purchased a new digital camera – having a cell phone that took better pix than my ‘real’ camera wasn’t cutting it… Clicking on a picture will take you to a larger image.

Paphiopedilum bloom (I forget the variety – I got it at the bargain table at the local greenhouse):

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Pitcher of Nepenthes truncata ‘Paisan Highlands’:

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Two Heliamphoras (pulchella and minor ‘Chiamanta’), two pots of Utricularia nelumbifolia, a bromeliad that has a utric plantlet in it, and a sundew:

Soma and synchronicity

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An interesting coincidence: I’ve been on a bit of a soma jag recently (research, not use) because of a brief mention of it in Helen Macdonald’s excellent Falcon. I started by re-reading Brave New World for old time’s sake; back in high school it added soma to my vocabulary; college brought R. Gordon Wasson and the idea of entheogens. Soma has been off the back burner and on a slow simmer in my head for a while; there seems to be a connection between the bowls found in Central Asian burials and either soma or Amanita muscaria use (allowing that A. muscaria might not be soma). The picture at the top of the post is a handle for one of these bowls. Falcon brought the simmer to a boil, so – in preparation for (maybe) writing a long soma post – I’ve been spending the past couple days reading things like The Soma-Haoma Problem. Now comes the coincidence – last night I was lying in bed reading The Areas of my Expertise and laughing my head off (not a great way to get to sleep, I discovered); page 87 consists of the following:

 

WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

The famous Cole Porter tune “I’m In, You’re In” was actually Porter’s typically wry response to the urine-drinking craze of the 1920s.

The practice originated with the fierce reindeer herders of Siberia known as the Koryac, who centuries ago had devised a means of purifying the hallucinogenic toadstool known as fly agaric. A local shaman would eat the mushroom, using his body to filter out the poisonous muscarine; its mood-altering compounds were preserved in his urine, which was then ritually consumed by other Koryac and also some of the more favored reindeer.

Marco Pensworthy, a monocled young libertine and staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, who was later dismissed for seducing the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, introduced the custom to New York. During Prohibition, many a tuxedoed, thrill-thirsty swell attended one of Dr. Marco’s private “Siberian Tea Parties,” beneath the frozen gaze of the stampeding elephants of the Hall of African Animals, where, wrote Porter…

There isn’t any shame in
Meeting with the Shaman
And making like the reindeers do…
It’s just a little wonder
That will unfreeze your tundra
I’m in, you’re in. You’re in too.

After his disgrace, Pensworthy would wander Central Park humming Porter’s tune and offering passersby swigs from a suspicious flask. Finally arrested and institutionalized, he trepanned himself to death in 1952.

Like a lot of good tall tales, there’s a grain of truth in there – the Koryac references are accurate regarding the mushroom and the urine (I’d be surprised if they shared their pee with the reindeer – but I could be wrong).

I’m running into these kind of coincidences more and more frequently (the one before this was putting Lost World of the Moa down, flipping the teevee to Animal Planet, and falling into the middle of a segment on Haast’s Eagle). I’m developing a hypothesis that rests on two factors – both Internet related – the immediate availability of information and the number of personal contacts with like-minded people that communication technology provides us with. I’ll do some more thinkin’ on it – perhaps a later post.

 

Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I’m in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love’s as good as soma. *

 

Rattus exulans, slavery and Rapa Nui

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Those who have read Jared Diamond’s Collapse are familiar with his analysis of the disaster on Easter Island. Diamond’s explanation focuses on over-exploitation of resources (especially deforestation) driven by the desire to build moai as the explanation for why by 1870, native culture had essentially disappeared. Now comes Terry Hunt to tell us that the scenario laid out in Collapse may not be accurate. His research indicates that deforestation started almost as soon as people colonised the island and that a major factor in the deforestation was the Polynesian rat. Rats ate the seeds of the now-extinct Jubaea palm, preventing reforestation. Prof. Hunt does not believe that the number of Polynesian colonists ever reached the 15,000 – 20,000 level, rather it hit an equilibrium of approximately 3,000 early on. The people that Europeans first encountered in 1722 were not a remnant population – they were it – the Rapanui culture. Where did the culture go? Disease, conflict with the Europeans and enslavement.

I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island’s prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today’s problems.

See this for a timeline – popular perception vs. what Hunt’s work suggests.

Caught one!

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I caught my cereus (aka orchid cactus) blooming. This one blooms at night for a single night. If you remember (aye, there’s the rub) you can see the enormous blossom – we’re talking a good 8 inches across – first thing in the morning. For your viewing pleasure:

Grow your own greenhouse.

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A very interesting plant from one of my favorite places on earth (the high places of Asia) – the Noble rhubarb. This plant grows at high altitude (4000m) and one of it’s adaptations to the extreme conditions in the alpine zone it inhabits is a mini-greenhouse formed of translucent leaves.

A picture of a few in a mountain valley (Nepal?):

And a wonderful plate from 1855 (via BibliOdyssey):

Flowers II

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A couple more – first, a couple orchids and my two bog containers. The purple flower is a Dendrobium and the yellow is a Brassia. There are a couple different Sarracenias in the bog containers – purpurea is the little guy(s) – I don’t know which species/cultivar the tall ones are. The tall Sarracenia has already bloomed – you can see the leftover – and the purpurea are getting ready to send up a buch of blossoms.


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Not a flower (though it did flower recently) – Neoregelia “Grenada”. This bromeliad produced a pup this spring that I’m planning on using in a frog vivarium. I wish it would pup some more – it’s a nice brom…

Flowers

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Lots of stuff in bloom – both in the ground and in containers. Some of the containerized stuff:

My hardy water lily got off to a roaring start – even though it’s been wet and cool, it’s already produced a half dozen blooms. My goal of someday growing a Victoria (cruziana probably, though I’d go for amazonica if I could) remains. In the other whiskey barrel my lotus is getting started. Even relatively hardy lotuses seem to like to wait until the water gets nice and warm – I’m hoping I’ll have a ‘lotus in bloom’ picture later in the summer.

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One of my orchid cacti got an early start as well. I have no idea what kind it is – I did a cutting trade at a bakery up north of the notches a couple years ago when I was up there for some bird hunting. The blooms last longer than they do on my other orchid cacti – 4 or 5 days as opposed to the 1 night bloom on my big white ones.