Botany and Cool Shit: Pleurothallis truncata

These rebellious young whipper-snapper-damn-“Millenials” are most definitely orchids. Don’t worry though, even though their racemes make them look like a back-talking pierced-tongue millenials, they aren’t capable of destroying any of our hard-won industries, primarily because they are “orchids” according to what Rush Limbaugh and Tomi Lahren said this morning, and are not, infact, millennials.

I however am still skeptical. Just look at them! With so many tongue piercings, I can’t fathom how they could be anything BUT millennials. They could be the very death of our Fabric Softener Industry. Just think of how the Diamond-encrusted Gold Watch Industry would suffer if all of the piercings are on their tongues! These millennials just obviously don’t know how to spend their money properly.

(Not my images, darlings. For these and other lovely orchids, check out Ruben Senes’s Flikr, here )

P.S. These are not actually images of millennials. Please note that these are plants and therefore have no money to spend improperly.

bold of you to assume millennials have money

okapiandpaste:

dangerbooze:

sailorofships:

fuckyeahwomenprotesting:

azzandra:

rookstheravens:

solluxismsnowaifu:

natashi-san:

reallifescomedyrelief:

viforcontrol:

beautifuloutlier:

gwydtheunusual:

zafojones:

Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.

Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together.
Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.

You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.

Frankentrees.

As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.

On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.

But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:

[source]

I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be

I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.

I need to be more like tree

I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.

what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?

Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).

As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “
including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”

It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.

Shit’s tight yo.

Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.

Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.

HOLY SHIT

THE LAST ONE

Also of note: Cities’ refusal to plant only non-fruit-bearing trees are only planting male trees: aka the pollen producers. So the guerrilla grafters are providing food AND cleaner air!

I WANT MORE OVERGROWN RUINS TO EXPLORE AND IF I HAVE TO MAKE THEM MYSELF THEN SO BE IT

darkbookworm13:

the-bluebonnet-bandit:

transmortifried:

*throws cress seeds at an abandoned warehouse* be the change you want to see in the world

Alright guys! Listen up! Its story time..

Does anyone wanna know why my user name is the-bluebonnet-bandit? No? Well I’m going to tell you anyway.

Its because a long time ago back in highschool my home town was slowly begining to be re-developed. A field I had loved as a kid moving in became a series of storage units. So basically, under the presumption of the myth that bluebonnets are illegal to pick in Texas, I decided the best way for me to handle this was to go out and buy a pack of bluebonnet seeds to basically chuck ‘em at the field in question. It takes time for a peice of land to be purchased and for a structure to take place, so if I planted some bluebonnet seeds in the field in early October, by next season there would be a whole field of them right? And then they couldn’t build there, hazzah!

Except its not as easy as it sounds. And now as an ecology major with a focus in plants, I know that. See, many empty fields in the suburbs are filled with agressive and non-native plants that would make it hard to establish something like a bluebonmet in just one season. I would need to remove those plants in a certain desired area around my square of bluebonnets then make sure each seed survives to flower. And then ideally I’d want to keep expanding my target patch, or establish a different patch the next year at a key place on the field.

Even if not illegal, destroying a field of our state flower, or a beautiful field of wildflowers is a harder sell to the public. It creates more dialogue. Draws more attention. And if you pair this with, say, a grassroots community campaign to spare the land in question you definately have more of a chance of achieving your group’s goal if it looks like the backdrop to someone’s family photo. Plus, planting wildflowers, helps the community and wildlife.

I’m not saying go out and chuck seeds at stuff until you re-claim your space and use gardening and tree planting (tree graffiti, or tree-fiti if you will…) as counter meaaures for over-development and urban sprawl.

But I’m not-NOT saying that…

*When to plant bluebonnet seeds

*How to plant a wildflower meadow

*US Wildflower planting guide

*Best trees to plant for your area

*How to make seed bombs

*Using community gardens to feed the hungry

*How to make a community garden

*How to conduct a petition drive

* Change.org – starting an online petition

*Find your townhall meetings

*Register to vote

This is really important info that needs to be shared, definitely don’t do the things on this list.

jayrockin:

despazito:

palaeofail-explained:

You know what else fucks me up? Algae.

This is a single-celled organism.

an independent woman

I see doubt in the notes so just wanted to say that YES, this is a unicellular organism! This is a species from a genus of green algae called Caulerpa, which are a siphonous algae. The frond shapes, the “rhizomes” it grows from, and the “roots” it extends into substrate are all extensions of a single multi-nucleate cell. Here’s what a siphonous alga looks like under a microscope, with no divisions in its cytoplasm:

It’s not the only algae like this, either! Caulerpa is a member of order Bryopsidales, which are all siphonous. Here’s some more macroscopic single cell algae:

Codium fragile, or dead man’s fingers. This one is a single long noodle of a cell with swollen growths on the outside called urtricles, packed together to create a firm “skin.”

Halimenia, a calcified algae whose shed growths are responsible for a lot of the beautiful white sand on tropical beaches:

Acetabularia

or mermaid’s wine glass, the adorable mushrooms of the sea:

Algae? Is actually very cool. And you can’t convince me otherwise.