It’s an avocado, an aguacate, also known as an alligator pear in English and a “lawyer pear” in Dutch. This is a Taft variety, an ancestor of the Lula … Read the rest “Science Art: Persea: Taft, by Royal Charles Steadman, 1914.”
A new beginning, from Elements of Philippine Agriculture on archive.org (though I found it on Flickr Commons).
From the D.M. Ferry & Co. Seed Annual, via the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
Fresh vegetables, fresh muskmelon. Mmm. I do love a muskmelon.
Scientific American looks at old trees to determine how so-called hunter-gatherers were actually actively “farming” the Brazil nuts and cocoa trees they relied on for food… Read the rest “Yes, indigenous South Americans were actively managing the forest.”
Mushrooms you can trust. I think.
From the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Flickr collection “Edible and poisonous mushrooms: what to eat and … Read the rest “Science Art: Plate 7: Sweetbread, Horn of Plenty, Puffball, Chanterelle, from Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms, 1894.”
Single-celled algae, magnified 500 times.
They float in ponds and stream banks. I found them in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, in the Rev. Francis Wolle’s 1884 book Desmids … Read the rest “Science Art: Plate XIV (Cosmarium species from Desmids of the United States….”
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An image of an arum, from the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s Aroideae, 1 album, consisting of plates from Heinrich Wilhelm Schott’s Aroideae. The artist… Read the rest “Science Art: Helicodiceros crinitus Schott by J. Strohmayer / Anstalt v. Reiffenstein & Rösch in Wein.”
Science Daily reveals an environmentally friendly GMO – a new variety of pothos ivy that University of Washington researchers designed to remove chloroform and benzene from the… Read the rest “Genetically-altered houseplants clear indoor air.”
SONG: “Upside Down”.
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Nature, 12 June 2018, “Africa’s majestic baobab trees are mysteriously dying”, as used in the post “The … Read the rest “SONG: Upside Down”
No, this isn’t a heart-wrenching sequel to The Little Prince. It’s a report in Nature on a baffling illness striking down some of Africa’s most distinctive trees:
… Read the rest “The baobabs are dying.”In
Where plants come from. (And hay fever.) These are as seen through a pretty powerful microscope – magnified 500 times – and drawn by a German pharmacist and chemist living in… Read the rest “Science Art: Tab X from Ueber den Pollen by Carl Julius Fritzsche, 1837.”
The Guardian has some sweet potato evolutionary research that unintentionally drives a wedge in the idea that the presence of the humble yam in both places indicates that prehistoric Polynesian… Read the rest “Sigh. Maybe a sweet potato *doesn’t* mean that prehistoric Polynesians visited South America after all.”
At the end of the 17th century, this was some weird and wild stuff – a fruit that in the Americas, they call “banana” (if I’m reading the Dutch text… Read the rest “Science Art: De XII Afbeelding (Banana) by Maria Sibylla Merian”
Nature is decidedly unappetizing in its discussion of how vegetables turn attackers against each other:
… Read the rest “Tomato plants can defend themselves – by turning caterpillars into cannibals.”Integrative biologist John Orrock and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin
Nature examines a tree that was alive in the time of Napoleon, yet has DNA that’s remarkably free of the usual damage of aging:
… Read the rest “Very old oak; pretty young genes.”Each time a cell divides, mutations can arise because
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