The Beautiful Dark

The Dark

Sometimes it can be sliced like black cheese

made from unknown matter.

Sometimes it is the surface of despair,

nothing leaving, everything sucked in.

Sometimes it is the beautiful dark,

coyote sounds and cows traveling

far from their source,

and you sleeping, my arm around you.

Later the tulips glow, yellow flamed

against the remnants of the dark

clinging to their petals.

Unfolding

Unfolding, a photo by pdecell on Flickr.

Unfolding,the map of the night
gets the location of every drop
of mist for anyone thirsting.
Be quick at dawn
before each place is extinguished by the light
and a new map draws itself.

Opuntia

From my garden, these cacti over winter nicely outdoors in Kansas.  The plant is beyond prickly- so hard to handle- but the flowers!

As if by their own light

Was out in the yard today after school with the sun out for the first time in maybe five days. Ironically though I got more interested in the textures than the color of the flowers in my garden.

Tulip- and the tulip is one of those "black" varieties.

Vinca

Dandelion

Fritillaria imperialis

We have had a spate of bad weather but today was sunny and I found these wonderful lilies along the path to my office. One of the campus groundskeepers said that these flowers smell like skunk. I couldn't detect it. I am one of those people that enjoys the musk scent of skunk and just thinking about it triggered memories...hence

orange skunk lily
no divine scent from its robes
musk woods remembered.

Friendship Garden

Friendship Garden, a set on Flickr.

Today I went to the Sister Cities Friendship Garden in Lawrence KS. This is a pocket park at 11th and Mass dedicated in the year 2000. Lawrence has several sister cities, this park dedicated to Hiratsuka City Japan. See the plaque for more details.

Oddly enough I had never taken photos here until today; the redbud and cherries in full bloom.

Narcissus

Narcissus, a photo by pdecell on Flickr.

April 20...

yellow paper lips
call me to outside myself
irony, gold mouth.

Magnolia

Here is a pink Magnolia from campus. One thing I didn't realize is that it is possible to isolate DNA from Magnolia fossils going back to the Miocene (17-20 million years ago)  and use it to help understand the phylogeny of these trees.  See Kim et al (2003)  http://www.amjbot.org/content/91/4/615.full doi: 10.3732/ajb.91.4.615 Am. J. Bot. April 2004 vol. 91 no. 4 615-620

By itself

By itself, a photo by pdecell on Flickr.

A petunia glowing
sidewalk's edge
keeps it alone

Pieces of Flower

In lab today we saw creatures
From two of the three domains-
Identified cocci and bacilli,
Paramecium and Amoeba swimming
or streaming under cover glass.

Then the plants-mosses green,
With diploid sex brown and erect;
Fern's hidden gametophytes
Androgynous creatures dwarfed
By cozy sitting room fronds.

Finally we consider the lillies-
Pink and spotted petals,
Orange pollen shed from anthers,
Little orange creatures slithering tubes
Down the style for sperm swim to the eggs.

Linnaeus glimpsed the flower's
Blindness to our conceits
Though his colleagues spun around
In their shrouds, screamed:
"No proper plant does this!"

Lab over, petals and sepals and ovaries
Are wings pulled from flies-
Pieces of flowers diced and swept away-
All the bone white facts collected,
Objectives checked for the next quiz.

We return to our cages and sit,
Peeling our soft triploid carpels,
Blind in our shrouds.

Summer!

Some people...

...watch for the first robin of Spring. What do I watch for? Obviously, the first...

Winter Beauty

Except for a couple of Dendrobium and a few paltry crown of thorns this Gymnocalycium is about the only thing blooming in my house right now. Normally a not very exciting bloom but when the light hit it just right the other day I had to get some shots.

Even the most ordinary can be beautiful in the right light.

Xylocopa Busted!

I've blogged on these wonderful carpenter bees before, but I never tire of taking shots of them. The other day I caught some in the act! Stealing nectar that is.



If you look closely at the head of the bee you can see it is biting the flower near the tubular base, the calyx. They do this to get the nectar that's in the base.

Here is another shot of a carpenter bee doing a bit of stealing:



So people often have this notion of bees and flowers being in one happy little mutualistic relationship- the reality is always more complex! In fact perhaps that leads to a good rule of thumb -

Truth is generally more complex than what we believe.

Dappled Water Lilies

dappled water lilies
Originally uploaded by pdecell

As a friend commented...you can't go wrong shooting pictures of water lilies but I really like the dappled light on these flowers. So enjoy. By the way these this year's blooms from the plant pictured back in 2006 here.

At work in Second Life

OK..maybe a little bit of playing. I've gotten back to working with sculpted prims and just for the heck of it and to challenge my limited skills but together a flower out of sculpted prim parts.

Here I am hard at work in my laboratory putting the insides of the flower together:



The final result:



And Simone sitting on a petal. She's not a very good pixie.



If you have SL installed the flower is at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/121/195/137

The Evolution of Beauty

I am never away from thinking about evolution. Being at Disney last week taking lots of pictures of flowers, got my thinking about evolution and beauty. Take this shot of a flower from Disney:



Actually this structure is called a spathe and it really a group of fused flowers wrapt around by a leaf. Think of Jack in the Pulpit and you have idea.


At first glance, not a traditionally beautiful picture and yet if you really look at it I suspect you will see a certain sensuousness to this image. I am reminded of Georgia O'Keeffe who allegedly said she painted flowers because she couldn't afford models. The traditional explanation for why flowers are beautiful is that that this is a by product of the coevolution between flowers and pollinators. But that really doesn't explain why they are beautiful for us. Part of the answer maybe that flowers also coevolved with us and breeders selected for beauty. But why beauty in the first place?

In terms of sexual beauty and attractiveness, it appears that humans and other animals have innate neurological biases that operate in conjunction with Darwinian sexual selection leading to elaboration of certain characteristics. But why these biases? Why not just respond to the narrow signs required for our reproduction and not feel rewarded emotionally by flowers and other things that we see as beautiful be it a flower, a poem or a butterfly?




Of course, I would want an evolutionary explanation because of my (innate perhaps?) desire for explanation. How do things come about? How do they work? But just because scientists are interested in these sorts of questions no way diminishes the emotional response and appreciation of beauty in all its forms.

Nor does beauty exist in a vacuum. Our innate neurological biases may be enhanced or over ridden by our experience or cultural preconceptions. For instance for me the beauty of the Rhododendron in the picture above is enhanced by the presence of these little bug (actually Katydid) nymphs:



There is a richness of connection that the nymphs add that for me is itself part of beauty and would be missing if I had taken a shot of the flower alone.

A Delicate Plant

I get periodic alerts from our local garden store when new succulents arrive and among the recent arrivals was this really cool little plant. The label said Kalanchoe and I almost passed the plant by because I don't have good luck with this genus. I like growing plants but it just seems that some common things just elude me even though people with cast iron thumbs instead of green thumbs can get them to grow in groves. Aloe vera is another such plant.


Either I forget to neglect them or the cat knocks the pot over or a sudden tornado flings the pot against the house and the plant gets sucked into a vortex and deposited in Missouri somewhere..stuff like that. Why just yesterday I lost a Cyclamen to our dumb as a post Siamese cat, Carl who decided to knock the pot on the floor, a cyclamen that belongs to my wife's boss and was loaned to me to nurse back to health. It was doing great too. Maybe I can salvage it.

Oh back to my new plant. A little search on the web on my cell phone while at the garden store suggested that this plant belongs to a section within the genus Kalanchoe called Bryophyllum from Madagascar that includes one of those nifty plants called mother of thousands that grows new plants asexually along the leaf margins. My plant based on matching pictures-I know dangerous to do this- appears to be K. Bryophyllum porphyrocalyx.

According to this site this plant grows about 35cm tall and is a common ornamental and hanging plant. Still I think a handsome looking plant compared to those garish Kalanchoes one sees so often in the stores. Besides even common plants hold surprises if you know where to look or just happen to stumble upon them.


Tonight I decided to take a few more quick macros of the plant which is now producing pollen. Take a look at this funky green pollen. I don't think I have seen guacamole colored pollen before, but here it is.



Enjoy!

What's in bloom now...

This wonderful fly pollinated plant (Huernia plowseii) is in the milkweed family (Asclepiadaceae) and these plants are sometimes called carrion flowers because some species smell like-well-carrion. Makes sense since these guys are fly pollinated. This species doesn't have much of an odor and is a wonderful easy to grow and propagate succulent.



For more pictures of succulent Asclepiads check out this site:
http://www.succulent-plant.com/asclepiad.html

Now that it is cooler...

OK that is relative here in Kansas but it is cooler than 40C in the shade now so my Dendrobium are blooming.