Dandelions

The dandelions beat the application of pre-emergent on our lawn this year. We have quite a crop. The flowers are low to the ground so that the mower would completely miss them. One year I had my (young) daughter take a little basket and fill it with the flowers. She enjoyed plucking them as they nestled in the grass almost like an Easter egg hunt; but there were so many buds waiting to open and produce seeds that the exercise did not diminish the dandelion population in our yard.

I’ve read that the colonists actually brought dandelions as a garden plant - used for salads. The greens taste bitter to me although supposedly if they are harvested early enough they are less so. The flower petals add an interesting color to salad; they don’t have much flavor (which may be a good thing).

This year my husband has already started his battle with the dandelions by spraying them. We both know that it is likely a losing battle.

Gleanings of the Week Ending April 13, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Be Out There - The Forecast Calls for Play - A guide from the National Wildlife Federation about being outdoors on the not-sunny days. The guide was produced in response to the statistic that 61% of parents said the weather was the biggest barrier to playing outdoors.

Sundew - external digestions - Image of a sundew plant curled around an insect

Take a Virtual Hike Along String Lake In Grand Teton National Park - An eHike…17 pictures

Best science and technology pictures of the week - From BBC Future dated 3/29

Versailles Gets Spiffed-Up On Its Day Off - What happens on Monday when Versailles is closed? It is a lot of work.

Psychedelic Bacteria - Sometimes photomicrography looks like art

New Mathematical Model Shows How Society Becomes Polarized - Applying ‘biased assimilation’ model

Spectacular Aerial Shots of International Airports - Newark Liberty and JFK Airports from above

Women computer science grads: The bump before the decline - Observations but not explanations

Utah’s Breathtaking Blue Hills and Painterly Desert - Hmmm --- this could be a great ‘next vacation’

Plum Blossoms and a Butterfly

Our plum tree is in bloom this week, ahead of the cherry tree. Its frothy pink is the early tree color every spring. 

It is one of the best features of our yard in spring. It is a little late this year because of some recent cold days.   

The insects find it as attractive as we do. There were several kinds of bees and a single butterfly - one of the first this season - enjoying the blossoms. The butterfly’s wings were ragged….he had survived long enough to enjoy the nectar of the plum blossoms.

US Botanic Garden - March 2013

The US Botanic Garden is one of my favorite places in Washington DC. I make it part of just about every visit. It is located on the Smithsonian Mall side of the US Capitol building. There were a lot of people around for the Kite Festival the day I was there in March; it was beginning to feel crowded by the time we finished our walk around the conservatory an hour after it opened. The warmth and lush vegetation of the conservatory were a welcome contrast to a blustery spring day!

Outdoors the birds were fluffy in the cold.

The pitcher plants still had some color but were showing the ravages of winter as were some of the other plants in the garden.

The tables and chairs were out in the gardens but it was too cold to be comfortable sitting in them. The sounds of the water in the First Ladies Water Garden were soothing --- no warmth though! At least the miniature iris and daffodils were blooming.

The Azalea Project

Every spring there are some major projects for the yard around our house that are unique to the year. This year one of those projects was planting azaleas to replace to bushes that broke under the strain of ice and snow a few years ago. We finally gave up on their recovery and dug them out last summer. When we went to the nursery to buy bushes last fall, we decided to wait until spring and plant azaleas. I had put it on the calendar as a March task but the spring weather has been so cold this year that we waited until last weekend.

Waiting the extra weeks meant that some weeds had started to come up where the bushes had been extracted. After getting the weeds pulled, loosening the soil and digging the holes was easy. The bushes we bought are projected to grow to be 4 feet high and 4 feet wide so we planted the two bushes 4 feet apart. The foliage on the azaleas is still somewhat bronze from winter. Will they bloom this year? Maybe not since I don’t see buds on them right now. I’m taking a strategic view; let them establish themselves this year and then bloom in the spring for many years to come.

There are irises planted to the front and sides of them now. That will give some color during late spring and early summer. Eventually some of the bulbs may have to be moved if they are too close or overshadowed by the bushes.

The day was so nice that I also positioned the stand for a new birdbath - pushing it down into loosened soil to make sure it was steady enough to hold the glass bowl.

What a satisfying way to spend a few hours!

Purple Botanicals

This is another in the series of posts using color as a theme. The purple flowers include cascades of orchids, crocus, pansies, iris, violets and wisteria. Enjoy the slide show of purple!

Washington DC Smithsonian Mall

A few days ago I posted some photographs from the kite festival held on March 30th. Some of the other sights that day are in this post.

The buffalo dancer sculpture in one of the gardens beside the National Museum of the American Indian was new to me. The stance of the figure was exotic but the face looked familiar.

Washington DC is full of classical columns. The photo of Ionic columns is from the National Gallery of Art. Another feature of the city are the fountians. They are often tucked away in small parks or courtyards between the buildings; for example, there are fountains on either side of the main entrance to the National Gallery.

The curves of the National Museum of the American Indian - both the façade and embedded in the glass of the doors at the entrance - are soothing and welcoming at the same time. They evoke the natural world in the middle of a city. 

We walked the length of the Smithsonian Mall - the Capitol at one end and the White House to the side. The Washington Monument was surrounded by scaffolding - still under repair for earthquake damage.

Pink Botanticals

This is the first in a series of posts using color as a theme. The pink flowers include deciduous magnolia, alstroemeria, begonias, poinsettias, azaleas, hyacinths, snapdragons, hydrangeas, freesias, orchids, camellias and dogwoods….so many beautiful blooms. Enjoy the pink show! 

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 23, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

First Nations Holistic Lifelong Learning Model - Graphic used in Aboriginal Worldviews and Education course on Coursera

Redtail hawk and heron bird cams - First redtail egg laid on 3/14, herons expected soon….at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology site

Photos of Glasswinged Butterfly - butterfly without pigment in their wings found in Central America

Sakurajima Volcano Eruptions - photos and video from February

Some Great Ideas For Spending Spring In The National Park System - I am going to enjoy the National Cherry Blossom Festival this year…but the other ideas on this list sound good as well.

Pantanal: Liquid heart of South America - Video about the giant South American wetlands

What Coke Contains - It is pretty complex

Which Google Reader Replacement Will You Use? - Aargh! I hate when things like this happen...Google Reader was my favorite way to keep up with my RSS feeds.

Where Siri Has Trouble Hearing, a Crowd of Humans Could Help  - Combining the best talents of machines and people for speech-recognition. What other problems might use this same approach? And use very inexpensive labor. Is this a new kind of sweatshop?

Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Level in Decades - Sad. Years ago we raised monarch caterpillars to butterflies that we released. Now we rarely see monarchs in our part of Maryland.

US Home Energy Use Shift (Charts) - Changes between 1993 and 2009 (space heating down….appliances, electronics, and lighting up).

AmpleHarvest.org - A site to help coordinate gardeners that may have seasonal surplus with food pantries near them. 

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 16, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Are Surgical Robots Worth It? - Evaluating technology is difficult. We want to believe that medical devices are better than what they replace...but they may not always be.

50 Disruptive Companies 2013 - The list from MIT Technology Review

Shell’s New Lens Scenarios - projections for 50 years from now…or even in 2100

30 Literary Cakes

Rebuilding after Sandy: How Assateague Island National Seashore Officials Are Dealing With Climate Change - barrier islands….and infrastructure on them...the islands will change and so will what man puts there

Frank Jay Haynes, A Photography Pioneer in Yellowstone National Park - also take a look at a book published by Haynes available on the Internet Archive

Science of Sinkholes: 20 Percent of U.S. Lies in Susceptible Areas - includes pointers to USGS resources about sinkholes toward the bottom.

Mothers of Invention -- Women who made it happen - I’d known about most of them…but there were a few that were new to me. It’s always interesting to get a quick slice of historical perspective this way.

Uplifting Posters Show One Positive Thing We Can Do Every Day - art of the positive

Get your Shit Together - life and death planning: low effort, high reward

Daylight Saving Time is Rife with Human Suffering - why do we put ourselves through the twice yearly time change?

Baltimore and Tucson Airport Art

On a recent trip between Baltimore and Tucson I captured some airport art.

In the Southwest Airlines terminal at Baltimore - there are dabs of paint on the windows. They add color on gray days and filter the sunlight on days when the sun is shining - very much like stained glass.

The baggage carousel in Tucson had an image of a pot etched into metal with an arc of color to one side. It was a good welcome to the city.

And then there were the Arizona scenes made with ceramics at the entrances to the restrooms - cholla and barrel cactus...with birds.

Previous posts about airport art: Dallas, other Tucson art.

Brookside Gardens Outdoors - March 2013

My walk around Brookside Gardens this month was brisk; it was quite cold. There was some progress toward spring since last month’s walk. More twigs have brightened in color. Sometimes - it is the growth from last year that is the most brilliantly colored.

And there are more bulbs up. The snow drops are beginning to fade.

The shelf fungus on an old stump that I check from time to time had been damaged. Pieces had been torn off. I left the pieces where they were and noticed the gill structure that is so hard to see when they are still attached to the stump.

The witch hazel that was blooming last month is still blooming - a welcome bit of color among other trees that are still winter bare.

The buds on the rhododendron are swelling. They are primed for spring.

In general the scene near the front of the conservatories was a good summary of the outdoor state of Brookside in early March: cold wilted ivy, a sprinkling of daffodils, and witch hazel.

Brookside Gardens Conservatory - March 2013

It was a gray and cold morning when I went to the Brookside Gardens conservatory this month. The warmth and gurgling water through the lush tropical plantings was a respite from all winter thoughts. Doesn’t the little water fall and river rocks framed by green look welcoming?

The tropical food plants continue to be displayed. I noticed a very small pineapple. Notice how the skin looks very prickly at this stage; the segments flatten as the fruit expands. The star fruit, chocolate and bananas seen on previous visits were still around. A new addition that I had not noticed before was cardamom in bloom.

Many orchids were in full bloom. The orange ones at the left were growing from a hanging pot. 

There were pink poinsettias tucked underneath some other plants. Were they left over from Christmas and just too pretty to jettison?

I always enjoy a walk around the conservatory - checking on plants from the last time I was there and discovering new ones.

Amaryllis

Brookside Gardens has several amaryllis in all stages of blooming in their conservatory when I visited in early March. The large flowers are the culmination of the unfurling of tightly compacted buds. Enjoy the slide show of the various stages of that process below!

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 09, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

What’s Happening to Great Lakes Ice - Compare 2010 and 2013 then watch the video of ice forming this winter

Vibrant Paint Patterns Brighten Up Urban Landscapes - Color in Beirut

The Science of Smart - Infographic.

Visual Storytelling through Intricate Paper Designs - Design in cut in paper always seem appealing to me. I probably include collections of them in my gleanings every time I find them. these are by Australian artist Emma Van Leest.

'Behind The Brands' Oxfam Report Evaluates Social, Environmental Impacts Of World's Largest Food Companies - None of them are doing very well when it comes to women, small scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate change, or transparency.

Education Indigenous to Place: Western Science Meets Native Reality - Article from the Alaska native Knowledge Network from 1999. The argument for integrative thinking relative to place rather than deep specialization (which has been the trend for some time in the sciences and medicine) is beautifully made in this article.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #38 - My favorite is oriental dwarf kingfisher. The size and shape of the head/beak make it clear that it is a kingfisher but the colors are extraordinary. I am in awe of photograhers that capture birdlife so vividly. My most recent (and poor) attempt is at the right; at least you can tell that it is a redwing blackbird.

Namibia: The Big Empty, part 1 - A short video from National Geographic

First Confirmed Sighting Of Rare Whooping Cranes At Natchez Trace Parkway - Hurray! Maybe an effort to establish an Eastern Migratory Population of these cranes is succeeding.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud - TED talk

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 23, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

It’s Getting Hot in Here, So … What, Exactly? - Strategies for adapting to a warmer world

Magnificent Frozen Waterfalls around the World - And people trying to climb them! My effort to capture a winter photo of Taughannock Falls from a few years ago is at the right.

Next-Generation Lithium-Ion Battery Designed - Projected to hold more than 3 times the charge and recharge in around 10 minutes…and available in 2-3 years. In this design the current graphite anodes are replaces with porous silicon nanoparticles.

Photography in The National Parks: Capturing Moonbows in Yosemite National Park - I felt lucky to see a moonbow at Cumberland Falls State Park in Kentucky….glad someone is skilled enough to photograph them and that they happen at Yosemite

What does 200 calories look like? - Lots of pictures….a way to gain perspective on the importance of portion size

Field Guide to National Parks App - From the National Parks Conservation Association; for iPhone and Android. I have not tried it yet and the reviews are mixed. I like the idea of it though.

Global Health Observatory - From the World Health Organization. The map gallery is a good place to browse.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #37 - My favorite images are the Anna’s Hummingbird and the Storks (in silhouette)

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think

The How-To Guide to Windows 8 - A series of articles (organized by this page) from CIO magazine

February 2013 Sunrise

The sunrise is creeping earlier but the trees are still bare so there is still a sunrise view from my front porch. By March it will be iffy.

I like the stark blackness of the branches against the brightening sky and the sun just peeking from a rooftop.

The morning I captured this picture seemed to be full of school buses coming through the neighborhood. I noticed the first one before 6:30 AM! That is an early morning for the students. And it was below freezing with the sun not yet contributing any warmth to the day.

Brookside Gardens Conservatory - February 2013

The Brookside Gardens Conservatory is a warm, lush place for a pleasant winter afternoon. There are lots of colors to enjoy - dominated by greens. I always look for the spirals of ferns unfurling. There was some construction going on at the main door when I was there so it was more noticeable than usual that the smaller plants are moved around.

The tropical fruits I noticed in January - pineapple, bananas, and chocolate - were still there. And I noticed the star fruit ripening. The begonias always seem to be blooming and the variegated crotons fill their corner with their bright leaves. Camellias were full of buds - and a few early blooms. They’ll be spectacular in March. I even found myself appreciating the lettuce for its translucent green leaves with reddish margins. I usually photograph the bird-of-paradise flowers that are dominated with orange but this time I tried the white ones instead; they are very large and produced by one of the oldest plants in the conservatory.

As I was leaving Brookside an older woman ask me what there was to see at the gardens and I recommended the conservatory as a richness of plants to see and an easy walk. She was in her 90s! I hope she enjoyed her outing to Brookside Gardens.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 16, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Bird-of-Paradise Project - from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology - lots of videos of the birds and how the images were captured too

Image of the Day: ‘Goose Bump’ Muscles - mouse hair follicles

Hans Rosling shatters the myth of “developed” versus “developing” nations - TED talk

Videos From Northeast Blizzard - National Geographic’s pick of 6 videos

Amazing Animal Hearts - heart trivia from the National Wildlife Federations. Did you know that a blue whale’s hear beats only 7 times per minute?

Geocaching - technology supported treasure hunting

Thousands of Merged Photos Display Sun's Surface

Desalination Seen Booming at 15% a Year as World Water Dries Up

A US high speed rail network shouldn't just be a dream - Wouldn’t it be nice to have the option to go high speed rail rather than airplane?

Table of Trends and Technologies for the World in 2020 - A thought provoking list of ideas from Richard Watson. His blog posts about the table is here and here (the second one provides a list of references).

Self-Assembling, Origami-Inspired Particles - lots of nanotechnology potential….how long until truly useful reality?

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 09, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Google Street View Now Covers Grand Canyon Hiking Trails - take a virtual hike in the Grand Canyon

Voyager into Stardust - short video

How Much Do Americans Pay for Fruits and Vegetables? - from National Geographic

HMS Beagle Voyage - visualization for the UK’s Natural History Museum

Frogcicle - a video of a frozen frog thawing…and hopping away!

Color from Structure - structural colors of peacock feathers, butterfly wings, fish and squid outer cells, hibiscus flowers…color producing nanostructures

Little House Books' Mary Ingalls Probably Did Not Go Blind from Scarlet Fever, Study Says - not that scarlet fever was not prevalent during the time…but it does not cause the symptoms (and blindness) described

Tulip fields - patchwork of color from the Netherlands

Coal Cooling Towers Come Crashing Down - 2 videos: one slow motion, the other with cartoonish faces on the towers

BugGuide - a site about insects of the US and Canada hosted by Iowa State University Entomology

Organized Paper Butterfly Installations Evoke Energy - beauty created with small papers