Strawberries are popular fruits, eaten world-wide. This is despite the fact that fresh strawberries do not improve after harvest and cannot be stored for very long. So popular are they that we have bred them to produce fruit throughout the growing season, not just briefly in June or July, and ship them from warmer climates or big greenhouses for year-round fresh strawberries, and we freeze them or preserve them as jams and jellies to them always available. fruit salad with strawberries This is not a new phenomenon. Strawberries are found all across the Northern Hemisphere and down the ..read more

Strawberries, genus Fragaria in the rose family, Rosaceae, are a popular fruit and have been for millennia. Twenty to 24 species are recognized, with cultivated strawberries adding many hybrids and varieties. They are native around the world, mainly in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, plus a few Southern Hemisphere species. strawberries, Fragaria The Flora of North America says the name Fragaria comes from fraga, Latin for fragrance, and -aria, possession, so, a sweet-smelling fruit. Other explanations exist; for example Wikipedia says fragum&nbs ..read more

 Polyploidy is whole genome duplication, when all the chromosomes and so, all the genes, of an organism double. In plants, it is very common; easily 3/4 of plants are polyploid.  an Oenothera Because polyploidy is a genetic effect that takes place inside the cell's nucleus, it is not casually observed. But botanists discovered polyploidy as soon as they had microscopes to look at the contents of the nucleus and when they tried crossing polyploids and got results that didn't make sense based on diploid genetics. (Diploid = 2 copies of the genome, polyploidy = numbers over 2 ..read more

 Catnip, Nepeta cataria, is one of the better-known little herbs because it is a drug for cats. Cats respond to catnip for about 15 minutes, with distinctive behaviors from rubbing on their faces and rolling in it to grooming and salivating. Young kittens do not respond and some adult cats never do. On the other hand, the response is widespread among cats of all kinds, lions, tigers, cheetahs, lynx, pumas and so on, but not dogs or rabbits or rats or other groups of animals. Since cats are common pets, people provide or grow catnip for them, with the result that catnip is known to many pe ..read more

Here is a photo album of pictures from Tokyo in April. Beautiful spring flowers. The photos are from April 2017 but if you hurry, you could still get there to see what it is like in 2024:  Classical Japanese design Modern Tokyo along an outdoor, second story walkway Old and new Of course I focused on the plants Japanese maples leafing out Big clones of iris, growing rapidly Violets flowering in the moss. Note the spike of new bamboo growth to the right of the violets, coming up like a spear with a flag on top. International weeds wer ..read more

It is still winter for me. The ground is brown and cold. Oh, I can see a trace of green in the lawn and a new shoot or two on the iris, if I look carefully.  My snowdrops and crocuses are out of the ground, but not yet flowering. So, here are photos of summer flowers for cheer. Just a few more months... Annual sunflower, the cultivated Ukrainian sunflower, Helianthus annuus Purple coneflower (Echinacea) and black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia) A milkweed, probably showy milkweed, Asclepias speciosa Rocky Mountain bee plant, Cleome serrulata Goldenrod, probably Missouri goldenrod, Solid ..read more

One peculiar characteristic of plants, not much shared by animals, is polyploidy, multiple copies of all the chromosomes. In plants and animals, DNA, the genetic material, is bound up in protein-wrapped bodies called chromosomes. Organisms have several to many chromosomes, usually as pairs. For animals, each species has a characteristic number--humans 23 pairs, dogs 39 pairs--with very little variation. One of the ways that plants are DIFFERENT is that chromosome number can vary a lot, between species but also between plants of the same species growing next to each other.   carrot ..read more

Since prehistory times, humans all over the world have collected black elderberries, the fruit of black elder (Sambucus nigra, viburnum family, Viburnaceae) (see previous post: link). The plant has been used medicinally for that long as well. In addition, it grows into a nice tree, 20, sometimes 30, feet tall, with useful wood. The leaves were used as insect repellents. Folklore abounded, some protecting the plant, some considering it accursed. My herbal, traditional, and folklore books have long sections on elder. Here is a selection of what they say. black elderberries, Sambucus n ..read more

Species in the genus Sambucus are called elder. That somehow doesn't sound right to my eastern North American ear, so I always say elderberries. That name I prefer is clearly weird--the tree doesn't always have berries, or the berries are just the fruit of the elder--but I'm not alone in this speech pattern, you can see it in a lot of U.S. writing. Historically and properly, it was elder, but bear with me, I keep sticking -berry on the name. Elderberry with berries They are shrubs or small trees with richly green long divided leaves. They produce big clusters of small white flow ..read more

 It has been snowy and cold, icy and cold, windy and cold, and just cold the last week. So here are so plant photos to remind you of warmth.  Ixora These you could go see, now, by going to tropical or subtropical places. Cultivated ornamentals, very beautiful. Imagine heat and humidity as you look at them: orchid bougainvillea camellia rosy periwinkle, Catharanthus probably ki or ti in Hawaii, red dracaena, Cordyline fruticosa Or, these, if you went to the Southern Hemisphere, where it is summer,      from ..read more