Gleanings of the Week Ending November 21, 2015

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

Poland's Mysterious "Crooked Forest" Populated with 400 Bent Pine Trees – Trees are remarkably resilient. Whatever caused these trees to be bent near the base…and then continue growing upright…they are survivors!

Why do we still not know what’s inside the pyramids? – I usually notice stories about Ancient Egypt that come in on my newsfeeds but my awareness is even higher right now because of the Ancient Egypt course I am taking on Coursera.

6 Homemade Vegan Sauces and Condiments that are better than Store-bought – I’m trying the recipe for peanut sauce after I finish the store bought bottle I have in my refrigerator!

The digital revolution in higher education has already happened. No one noticed. – Another dimension of higher education not mentioned in this thoughtful piece is the continuing education that many post-career individuals seek. I recently looked at face to face classes offered in my area of Maryland and decided that the selection available from Coursera and other online providers was much greater (and the price was right too). Another case where the digital revolution in higher education has already happened.

Photography in the National Parks: Your Armchair Guide to Big Bend National Park – Part 2  - A continuation of an article I included in my October 31 gleanings….good info for planning a trip there.

Tangy and Tasty Fresh Cranberry Recipes – My ‘new’ recipe to try for Thanksgiving is the Cranberry-Carrot cake. I am not going to put icing on it….eat it more like muffins for Thanksgiving Day brunch. Don't forget Cranberry Orange Relish either! Wegmans recipe is here.

Move Over, Turkey: Meet the World’s Other Bald, Be-wattled Birds – Thinking of turkey this week….here are some other birds that have similar heads. They all look odd to me!

Field Drain Tile and the “Re-Eutrophication” of Lake Erie – Why the algal blooms have worsened in recent years after improving for the prior 15 years.

Elegant Greenhouse Photos Mimic the Ethereality of Oil Paintings – Hmm…the textured glass reminded me of a shower door. This might turn into a winter photography experiment!

Incan Mummy Genome Sequenced – The mitochondrial DNA analysis was the first completed and placed the boy in a very small subgroup – only 4 other known individuals. Other genetic analyses of the 500 year old mummy of a 7-year-old boy are ongoing.

3 Free eBooks – November 2015

So many good books to choose from…it was hard to pick just 3 – like it is every month. I’m having a hard time making progress on my stacks of physical books when there are so many beautiful eBooks that are freely available.

Linden, Jean Jules. Lindenia : iconographie des Orchidées . Gand (Belgium): Impr. F. Meyer-van Loo. 1885. Ten volumes are available on the Internet Archive here. What not to like about orchids….and more orchids!

Burke, Doreen Bolger, et al. In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1986. Available from the Internet Archive here. The Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s and 1880s pervaded so much of the way ‘home’ looked…and it is surprising how much the individual pieces still appeal even though the aggregation in many of those rooms would look overwhelming today. The gilded peacock feather motif (that I clipped) was used on a book binding.

The Griffith Institute. Discovering Tutankhamun in Color. The Griffith Institute, University of Oxford. 2015. Available from the Griffith Institute site here. The black and white photographs taken when the tomb was first opened in the 1920s have been colorized and many are available with annotations online. Click on the image to get an enlarge view. I’ve seen two different King Tut exhibits and still learned some new things from these photos! This site was one of the references from the Ancient Egypt course I am taking via Coursera.

Bonus!!! A fourth eBook for this month…also a reference from the Ancient Egypt class I am taking: Teeter, Emily (editor). Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization. Oriental Institute Museum Publications: The University of Chicago. 2011. Available here. Easy to read…and well illustrated. A lot has been added to our knowledge in this area in the past 20 years.

November at the Brookside Gardens Conservatory – Part 2

The Brookside Gardens Conservatory offered a number of opportunities for thematic photography when we walked around its paths earlier this week. Yesterday I posted about the mums and the reds/oranges that I missed in those flowers but found in others. Today the themes are focused on light and curves. There was a leaf that seemed to glow in a spotlight. I’m not sure which magnification I like the best. The higher magnification almost looks like it is on fire!

The corner of the conservatory seemed crowded but there was one plant that found a way to shine in the jumble.

And what about this ‘light at the end of tunnel!

Shifting to curves….the variegated crotons were crowded together – I like the curves of their leaves and the veins too.

The cycads are all curves….from the fibrous centers to the stubby arms of the trunk.

The fiddleheads are nestled in center of this large fern…their wavy curves still tightly coiled.

The bromeliad is orderly curves…except for the green one in the foreground that seems to be going in a different direction!

Succulents are stuffed curves. This one has a little point at the end of each leaf (or is it a stem). Look at the orientation of those points toward the center of the plant. They could be a model for aliens conversing.

Papyrus – river rocks – ripples of water…lots of curves.

November at the Brookside Gardens Conservatory - Part 1

Last week when we went to see the mum display in the Brookside Gardens Conservatory, the conservatory was closed because they were cleaning off the white coating on the glass roof. Yesterday – we discovered that they had already closed the south conservatory to set up for the miniature train exhibit that will be there after Thanksgiving until just after the beginning of 2017. The north conservatory was open and there were lots of mums.

The main colors were pink and yellow. I noticed the different petal shapes: think with splits at the end that curled in different directions,

Shallow scoops forming a tight ball,

Deeper scoops forming a flower with more space and deeper color in the center,

And huge round balls of petals that never seems to unfurl completely (these I associate with football mums that were popular when I was in high school).

As we walked outside – there was a pot of mums in the bright sunlight that might have come from the south conservatory. Hopefully the weather will be mild enough for them to complete their bloom cycle outdoors.

I was surprised there were not more colors of mums this year. I missed the oranges and reds so couldn’t resist taking pictures of other flowers in the conservatory to fill the color void.

 

 

Even the trimming one of the conservatory gardeners was making included red!

Woodpecker Feathers

Last week I saw a lot of birds one morning at our feeder (juncos, cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, titmice), flitting between the trees in our yard (blue jays and robins) and back in the forest there were two kinds of woodpeckers: pileated and red-bellied. I next day I saw the red bellied woodpecker again and then it seemed like there were very few birds around at all for a few days. When I was working the yard yesterday – I found a pile of feathers. There must have been a predator in the area…probably some kind of hawk.

The pile was back in the pile of leaves I’ve creating at the edge of the forest. There were long feathers and fuzzy bits of down. The black and white pattern looked like a woodpecker and was probably the red-bellied woodpecker since a pileated woodpecker are mostly black rather than the black and white pattern.

I picked up some of the feathers to photograph. They were a little damaged so probably had been on the ground for a few days.

Yesterday, I noticed more birds at our feeder again. Maybe the predator has moved on.

Intimate Landscapes – November 2015

This is the second month for my Intimate Landscapes series (after reading Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book (available online here)) featuring images from the month that are: smaller scale but not macro, multiple species, and artsy.

A dance of colorful leaves on green grass. Tulip poplar and maple leaf shapes are easily spotted.

Sturdy fronds of a fern among, mostly brown, leaves. Maple and tulip poplar leaves again…maybe some beach and oak too.

The zinnias died back at the first of the mornings in the 30s but the sunflower continues to be green…and blooming among the dried stalks of everything else.

The onion seed pods had lost most of their seeds – rattled way by the wind. The trunk of the sycamore and its huge leaves provide no shelter for the wind.

Zooming – November 2015

The ‘zooming’ collages for this month all about views of fall:

• Colored leaves
• Mushrooms and puffballs
• Seed pods
• Geese over the treetops
• Ferns and moss surrounded by died leaves

Enjoy the slide show!

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 14, 2015

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

Globe Is Set to Cross 1 Degree C Temperature Increase Threshold in 2015 – Not good. The averages for temperature and carbon dioxide concentration is the atmosphere are still climbing…and we have done nothing so far to change the trend.

Weight’s the Matter? – The Scientist has an issue on obesity and I am including the articles I found most interesting in this gleanings list. This post outlines the articles available…from causes to the link to cancer (did you know that obesity has replaced smoking as the top preventable cause of cancer death in the US?) to possible side effect of environmental chemicals to weight loss.

Obesogens – Environmental chemicals change cause metabolic changes in animals causing them to gain weight. It is harder to prove for humans…but there are a lot of obese people these days. Maybe sedentary life style and high calorie diets are not the only reason.

Microbesity – Gut bacteria play a role in obesity too.

How to Design within Novel Ecosystems – Strategies when it isn’t possible to restore an area to its natural state….how to create something that still has high ecological value.

Ancient brains turn paleontology on its head – 520 million year old arthropod brains. When the first one was discovered, it was viewed as a fluke. Now there are more and the assumptions that said that brains are never fossilized are falling away.

6 Asian Noodles – Sometimes an article encourages action. This one caused me to add soba noodles to my grocery list and I’ll be trying them this week! I like that they have more protein than most noodles.

Insect Wings Made to Look like Blooming Flowers Explores Natural Concept of Mimicry – Beautiful work by a Paris-based artist….although I have to make an effort to not think about all the insects that were sacrificed.

Scientists Grow Beautiful Designs for First Ever Microbial Art Competition – A different type of media: bacteria and fungi in petri dishes!

The Chemistry of Silly Putty – A simple ‘toy’

Beautiful Food – November 2015

There are so many beautiful foods to choose from this time of year. It seems like there are bright colors at every turn.

The salads have the orange of sweet potatoes or carrots…the dark green of parsley or cilantro…the magenta of watermelon radishes…even the cheese and boiled eggs in this salad are colorful! The whole is as beautiful as it is tasty.

And the salsa made with end of season bounty of tomatoes, cilantro, onions, hot pepper, garlic, and onions…gets just a spike of citrus from a lemon (peel and all). The colors and flavors blends together to contribute to several kinds of meals and snacks: salads, stir fries, tacos, chips….

And what about all the root veggies this time of year: white turnips, watermelon radishes, sweet potatoes (ok…I cheated a little – the green is a broccoli stalk rather than a root vegetable)…all in one stir fry. I add a little water when I first start cooking them to make sure they have enough cooking time to soften. Again – the appearance of food makes a big difference in the appeal of the meal.

New this month – and something I look forward to every years – is the arrival of pomegranates in the grocery store. I buy at least one a week. The seeds always look like little jewels to me; the color meshes well with the season. And they are my favorite afternoon snack until the season runs its course sometime in the early part of next year!

For the Birds

Earlier this week I noticed that the bird bath on our deck railing was frozen when a dove tried to get a drink, failed and then proceeded to slide across the ice while two cohorts watched. It was time to put out the heated bird bath – of the changes we make to the deck for the birds in winter. The ring that is attached to our deck was purchased with the bowl we use in summer quite a few years ago and I was pleased to find a heated bowl that was exactly them size last fall.

Our bird feeder is full but there are a lot of foods in the woods and gardens now so we don’t have as many visitors as we will later in the season.

I put seed in a bowl sometimes since the feeder doesn’t work well for the larger birds (cardinals and doves) and sometimes even the small birds prefer the bowl. Once a squirrel discovers it the bowl empties very quickly so we try to chase them off. The chipmunks are fun to watch.

On the afternoon after I filled the bowl with seeds I saw a male cardinal, juncos, a nuthatch and a chickadee…we were fast enough chasing off the squirrel for them to still get their treat.

Our deck is ready for the birds of fall and winter!

Pressed Leaves

Back in August I trimmed the lower branches from our sycamore and saved some of the leaves by inserting them with paper towels in a book. I rediscovered the books with the pressed leaves yesterday. The leaves had dried retaining their characteristic overall shape. The top side of the leaves was a dull green – darker than the fresh leaves. The underside was lighter and the veins were still easy to spot. Between the veins the leaf was as delicate as tissue paper.

Taking a close up – the veins are brown instead of the light green they were when they were fresh. Sycamore leaves are a little fuzzy on the underside and that still seems to be true for these dried leaves.

There was a tiny leaf that was dominated by the veins that bring the water and nutrients from the soil up to the leaves. The new leaves are structured for their growth throughout the season so their veins always look large in proportion to the size of the leave. If this one would not have been cut it would have increased dramatically in size before the fall.

Sometimes insects cause leaves to take on a lace-like appearance. This leaf might have fallen early even if I had not cut the branch.

The last leaf I photographed was two colors and reminded me of a topological map with mountains and valley – brown rock and green forests.

At first I thought I might try to make Zentangle® patterns on the leaves….now I’m not so sure. They crumb very easily.

Our Tulip Poplar

Our tulip poplar grows at the back of our yard – at the edge of the forest between a pine and a maple. Its leaves began to turn yellow relatively early in the fall but some of the leaves stay on the tree until the very end of the season. The first picture in this series was taken on October 10^th; the tulip poplar already had yellow leaves while the maple was almost totally green.

By October 24^th, the poplar had yellow and brown leaves and some were beginning to fall to the ground. The maple was red at the branch tips and had not dropped many leaves at all.

By October 27^th, the poplar a thinned a bit.

And by November 7^th, both the maple and the tulip poplar had lost all their leaves!

We moved into our house about this time of year over 20 years ago and the flying yellow leaves from the tulip poplar are the ones I associate the most with fall at this house. The trees are the tallest in the forest behind our house so they are impossible to ignore. The shape of the leaves is easy to recognize. Those leaves deteriorate rapidly from yellow to brown to mulch.

The seed pods last longer. They stay on the tree and release their seeds throughout the winter and into the next spring.

The tulip poplar was not a tree I ever saw growing up in Texas. When we moved to the east coast – to Virginia and then Maryland – they were one of the first trees that I noticed….and I like having one in my backyard so that I can see it every day.

Our Sycamore

We have a sycamore tree behind our house. It planted itself near the base of the stairs down to the lawn and I have simply let it grow…trimming off the lower branches so that it would not get in the way when we mow the grass. It will eventually provide shade for the three stories of the house on the west side; it’s tall enough now to shade the first two stories. This week I noticed how thick the fallen leaves were.

Sycamore leaves take a lot longer to degrade than maple or tulip polar – the other trees that drop leaves into our back yard – and they are much larger too. They keep growing from the time they unfold in the spring to the time they fall. They are often bigger than a dinner plate! They have to be raked or they will smother the grass. I got started on it this past weekend but it is quite a job.

The leaves sometimes fall when they are still a bit green…or mottled yellow and brown…or like cracked leather. I liked the color of the mottled leaf still on the tree with the sun shining through it. This is about as pretty as the sycamore leaves get in the fall.

The tree has bark that peels away and leaves the top part of the tree white. It is an easy tree to recognize in the winter

Last year our tree had one seed ball (that I saw); it is showing is maturity this year with many seed balls.

Our Maple

I took pictures of our  maple (actually it is our neighbor's but close enough to the property boundary that we rake about half the leaves) as it changed this year. On October 10th it was still mostly green.

By the 24th it was red at the tips of the branches.

Three days later – on the 27th – it was red all over.

On the afternoon of Halloween a lot of leaves had fallen and the sun shining through the remaining leaves caught my eye.

Yesterday – almost all the leaves had fallen and it was obvious that our neighbor’s yard crew had blown the fallen leaves and left exposed dirt. I am going to rake the leaves that are covering grass but leave the ones that are on dirt. Next spring I’ll need to consider what we can do for the area under the maple that has lost its grass as the tree has gotten larger. The roots of the tree are so dense that I don’t know that even shade loving plants will survive…but that is a project for next spring.

For now I’ll savor the last few leaves on the tree and the smell of leaf tea as I rake way the leaves from the grass and into the forest.

Gleanings of the Week Ending November 7, 2015

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

The Chemistry of Blood – When I do nature hikes for elementary school children about soil or rocks I always ask them what makes soil or rocks look red (some of them know that it is iron) then I comment that there is iron in our blood too….and that locks it for almost all of them. One time a boy answered my original question with one word: ‘blood’ – thinking he would get a disgusted reaction from me and he was really surprised when I told him the red came from iron in both cases!

Vitamin D pill a day may improve exercise performance and lower risk of heart disease – More evidence that more of us probably need Vitamin D supplements. It’s one I have been taking the past few year.

300 million-year-old 'supershark' fossils found in Texas – Lots of things are ‘large’ about Texas.

The Benefits of Getting Older – They define ‘old age’ and any age over 60! Are you surprised by any items on the list?

Greenland is Melting Away – How they take measures of the ice sheet from the ground…supplementing what can be determined from satellites and drones. The graphics of the rivers on the ice sheet are mesmerizing.

Hunting down hidden dangers and health benefits of urban fruit – When I read the headline I was braced for a lot of negative news…but it turns out that urban fruit is good overall.

Butterflies Weaponize Milkweed Toxins and Wing structure helps female monarch butterflies outperform males in flight – There were two stories about Monarch Butterflies in the news this week….and I saw one – probably migrating – as I was hiking with second graders this week!

Be Mesmerized by the Shifting Complexity of our Sun – The full video is a little over 30 minutes…and there is music too!

The Chemistry of Fireworks: Bangs, Crackles & Whistles – Color gets a lot of attention when it comes to fireworks. This post from Compound Interest is about the other things we enjoy about fireworks.

Hungry for Change: Deer Management and Food Security – Our area has a huge deer population and we have the chomped trees and bushes in our yards to prove it! The idea of combining deer management and food security may be something more communities should consider.

Big Fall at Mt. Pleasant

This past week has been the peak for falling leaves at the Howard Country Conservancy’s Mt. Pleasant Farm. On Monday it was breezy and leaves were flying. On Wednesday, I decided it was sunny and a good day to photograph the trees that still had some leaves. Today I am posting this before I make my trek there…and anticipating that there will be fewer leaves left on the trees.

It was relatively calm and the leaves were drifting down. This maple has a thick carpet of leaves that has fallen recently

Since the carpet still had a lot of color.

The sunshine and clear sky made the color seem all the more brilliant although the foliage was thinning.

Even the gingko has started dropping its leaves.

But in almost every direction there were some trees that had already lost their leaves – like the maple in the rain garden that was so brilliantly red just last week. I always think of the brilliant leaf colors as the last hurrah of the season before everything is hunkered down for winter.

Missing the Weekly CSA Share

This is the first week I don’t have a CSA share since the season ended last week and won’t start again until next June. It feels odd to not have the bounty of fresh veggies coming in from that source. I am intent on getting every bit of goodness out of what is left --- wondering how long I can go before I’ll buy veggies from my grocery store’s produce section. It won’t be this week certainly.

The refrigerator was so full that the ‘cool’ actually got a bit cooler and some of the greens froze…so I used them in soup and stir fry. I still have lettuce, spinach, radicchio, and cabbage for salads…lots of root vegetables (carrot, turnips, sweet potatoes, and radishes) for slaw. I have peppers, pac choi and tatsoi for stir fry. I’m trying to eat the most fragile veggies first.

I thought the cilantro might degrade first so I made salsa with it (using tomatoes and hot peppers from earlier in the CSA season and frozen). I love the blend of the veggies with onion, garlic, and half a lemon. I use salsa for more than just tacos; it becomes salad dressing and stir fry sauce…a drizzle on the top of soup.

There is still a butternut squash, small white potatoes, and garlic along with a lot of sweet potatoes that don’t take up any room in the refrigerator and will be edible for quite some time.

I’ve got dried thyme and parsley/carrot tops that will season foods into the winter too.

The big lesson learned from the CSA is how good vegetables can be. I am a little spoiled with getting them the same day they are picked so I choose carefully in the grocery store during the offseason. I don’t try to eat the same all during the year. During the winter I like to have warm meals so I tend to eat a lot less salad type greens and stick with the sturdy greens (kale, cabbage, pac choi) that hold up well in stir fries or soups. Sometimes my grocery store has organic greenhouse dandelion greens and that is a treat in winter!

Hydrangea Flowers

After I took the picture of the one flower on our hydrangea bush last weekend – just about the only part not eaten by the overpopulation of deer in our area – I looked around the house at the hydrangea flowers I had cut in previous years from the same bush. They tend to dry and retain their shape…and sometimes some color too.

The oldest ones are probably over 5 years old. They have visible cat hair and dust they’ve collected from the air as they stood in their vase on top of the book case. There is still some color (originally pink) in the tips of some of the petals.

Some of the petals curved so that the veins became more visible.

Last year I cut some more and they have more of the pink color remaining although some parts turned a deeper brown.

The purple/pink flower is from earlier this summer. The color deepened as they dried.

I’m trying to decide if I want to risk putting them all in one vase. They are fragile enough that they might crumble completely. The color variation and shapes of the dried flowers appeals to me.

Fall at Centennial Park

I missed the peak of fall foliage at Centennial Park. In mid-October there was still a lot of green (see post here). This past weekend, some of the trees had already lost quite a lot of their leaves…although there was still plenty of color. When we first got there on Saturday morning, the sun was in the treetops and there was a mist rising from the lake because of the temperature differential between the water and the air (it was a cold morning).

There were a few clouds in the sky and contrails across the sky.

I walked around a little to look around and let the sun come more. I noticed: dew on fallen leaves. This one is a tulip poplar.

Drifts of leaves in the parking lot. Many of the red ones were from a nearby maple.

The view straight up to the sky shows both color and that some trees are already in winter form.

Flocks of Canadian Geese took off from the lake – circling over the trees and into the brighter sunlight.

And finally the sun came all the way down the trees on the opposite shore.

The Great Blue Heron that had made a ruckus when we first arrived had retained his perch in the colorful trees there.

Zentangle® - October 2015

The Zentangle habit is one that I even take on vacation! There is always enough room for tiles, a pen, a pencil, and tortillion!

Toward the beginning of the month I started experimenting with the patterns on soft drink bottles. My rationale was that making patterns on a curved surface rather than a flat tile would take some practice and I was considering making spherical Christmas ornaments for our tree this year; in the meantime, the decorated bottles could hold water for when I was hiking. I bought an ultra-fine point Sharpie. The ink did indeed stick to the plastic although I discovered that any residual oils (like from fingerprints) caused it to wear off. I also discovered that it pooled a bit if I didn’t pick up the pen fast enough so continuous line patterns were preferable. I am not back to tiles…and thinking of ornaments made out of paper coaster material – hanging diagonally ….I’ll have so of my early test tiles later in this post.

I am enjoying the colored pencils even though the patterns are made with the Micron pen.

I find myself using more open patterns so that I have spaces to add color. The group below includes a test of the Sharpie on a strip of plastic…before I used it on the soft drink bottles.

I like the flower fillers!

The group of tiles without color below is from when I was traveling. For some reason – I reverted to more traditional tiles while ‘on the road.’

Sometimes I use only one color…and in areas that I would have done shading.

Sometimes I think – after the fact – of themes for tiles…like the sea (upper left) or jewels and scarves (upper middle). I decided to start naming the tiles.

The names for this batch (starting at the upper left and moving to the right…then lower left and right): Opera house, Space I, D flower, Deed pods, Tri-red, D flower 2, 2015. The last one was an experiment on the coaster material to hang on the tree.

Below are three more with potential to hang on the tree. I started using a red Sharpie. I like the color but the lines are very fat! The lower right is a Zentangle with my name in hieroglyphs (one of the activities in the Coursera course on Ancient Egypt)…and I did auras around it to make a cartouche.

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The Zentangle® Method is an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns. It was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. "Zentangle" is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.