Hydrangea serrata 'Blue Bird'

End of the day and a bit of nonsense.  I couldn't decide which of these two images to post tonight - I'd post one, then prefer the other - and then I'd switch them again.  So here they are, both of them, two images of the same flower.  I'm grateful that this 'Blue Bird' is surviving, since I fear that the bluebirds nesting in the purple martin house have had an unfortunate encounter with a very large hawk that seems to be frequenting my place of late.  One must take the good with the bad, since a swallowtail kite can be spotted overhead almost every day as well - something that I should report somewhere to someone, but haven't.  Does admiring them, privately, count for something...anything?  (If it doesn't, it should).  So a box of asparagus (an heirloom variety, 'Purple Passion') arrived in the mail, and I had completely forgotten that I had ordered them.  So last Sunday, Mother's Day, inbetween two tornado warnings, I dug trenches for the 25 crowns and got them planted.  Then two days ago I received a wonderful heirloom rose ('Valentine'), straight from the Antique Rose Emporium - a rose in honor of my Mom from a graduate school friend who knows how much I love roses.  It looks like a beautiful shrub rose (and I might just put it in a pot, it looks so beautiful in one in the ARE image).  And today?  My third viburnum arrived from Wayside, Viburnum carlesii (Korean spice viburnum), but I'm not quite sure yet where that one will go.  The garden does indeed grow, doesn't it?  (As does the grass, due to the weekend's rain - which means that I need to mow grass which I'm not in the mood to think about tonight.).

~~~~~

End of the day and a bit more nonsense.  My lab is in a funk.  Relax - Joy is hanging in there, perhaps even doing a bit better - but honestly, nothing is going right.  What is right you ask?  Well, it would be nice for our DNA to amplify - with the appropriate controls being clean.  It would be nice for someone to want to go in with us on antibiotic resistance and susceptible plates, since purchasing 2000 of them would bankrupt one part of our project.  It would be nice if a student's microbial isolate - one that she is pursuing with respect to a broad-spectrum anti-microbial would cooperative and sequence cleanly.  The '...it would be nice...' list seems very long this week - and as for me, it would be nice to not sit in a conference room all day, in meetings, because suddenly I find that I'm on every committee POSSIBLE.  It would be nice for the reviews of a rejected grant to refer to your model organism as a 'bottlenose dolphin' instead of (repeatedly) as a 'blue nose dolphin'.  What the hell is a blue nose dolphin?  The only one I could find is on sale for $5.99 and you have to be over 18 to purchase.  Geez.  And last evening the cranky dog from next door broke through my front fence (and came into my yard, along with his sidekick, named 'Little Man') and The Stanimal, in his 'I'm the man of the house' mode (and definitely not in his Stannish-let's-go-to-an- opera-and-preferably-something-italian mode) promptly jumped the cranky dog and soon there were people screaming on the other side of the fence 'your dog attacked my dog' and I'm thinking 'why the hell is your dog in MY yard?' and this from people whose dog runs wild, looks flea-infested and generally miserable.  (I would kidnap it, but it would be so obvious).  So the well-behaved (for the most part) Stanley is captured, stuck in the car, and when I go to open the front gate to let out the cranky dog, he tries to bite me.  Again:  Geez.

~~~~~

End of the day and a bit of poetry.  So the lab's senior graduate student presented today for lab meeting - his vision/question/hypothesis/approach regarding the role of membrane vesicles in his microorganism of interest.  I won't go into the sordid details - but basically we have to make some decisions, important ones, that will partially determine this student's fate over the next few months to a year - and will essentially determine the essence of his dissertation (you are thinking:  a dissertation has an essence??  Of course it does!  Come on now).  Proteomics?  If so, on what?  If so, how - qualitative or quantitative?  Semi-quantitative or...not?  What are the chances that it will tell us anything...anything at all?  A new Master's student has joined the lab - a young man who will start his project here, then head over to a lab in Australia where he will do additional studies, before heading back to Charleston to finish up.  Hmmm.  I hope that works.  If it does, it opens a few doors for us with respect to collaborators - and to the Great Barrier Reef as a field site.

~~~~~

But, you guessed it, we started lab meeting with a poem presented by Katherine.  The poem that she read was written by a Charleston poet who will be reading at tomorrow evening's The Main Branch Poetry Series, along with poets Kit Loney and Garret Doherty.  (I hope the poem keeps it's formatting when I save it - often it doesn't, so my apologies for that if it occurs...and if you notice). 

~~~~~

Sleeptown by Bryan Penberthy

Places like this aren't invented.
            The cold, industrial polish of this city
skews light, and what it reflects

            it returns badly. Splitting the landscape,
an obsidian river carves
            silhouettes of brush and rocks, banks strewn with mica

and quartz shards, pale smoke frozen
            in crystal. A storm-split oak arcs into
bridge-lit water, a coral

            reef suspended in dandelion wine. The trees
and half-illuminated
            buildings seem submerged.

            I know so little
about things that matter. How
            to be a good man. Why rivers are constantly

moving, apparently toward
            ends that mean completion. Whether, drinking
their waters, I would forget

            these twilights—the smell of wet brick and broken pines,
indigo and sapphire-troubled
            skies—or drown. My distracted heart beats codes

I'm unable to translate.
            The only ritual I know how to perform
is rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

            

Comments

[Les]

'Blue Bird' is at the top of my list of favorite hydrangeas, primarily for its color, prolific blooms and its vigor. I trimmed it a couple of summers ago and threw the clippings behind some other shrubs, too lazy to take them to compost. They rooted in, and I was able to give 3 to other people.

[Pam]

Les, I really like 'Blue Bird' too. In some ways it is much less showy that some of the others - but here in coastal South Carolina, it blooms early and the blooms stay for a long time. I have noticed lately that a bunch of my larger hydrangeas have lower branches that have rooted - I like that, and will pot some up - either for friends or to move around to other places in the garden. I have another deeper blue lacecap:

http://talesfromthelaboratory.typepad.com/tales_from_the_microbial_/2007/06/this_hydrangea_.html

It is more showy, the flowers are much larger - and the color blue is just wonderful, but I didn't write down it's name. Do you have any ideas regarding what it might be?

[Pam]

ps It is most likely 'Blaumeise':

http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/49179/

(But boy, that cultivar name doesn't ring a bell).

[Annie in Austin]

"I know so little about things that matter...I'm unable to translate "

Those words are still ringing. Thanks, Pam.

Something I do know, important or not, is that 'Valentine' is frequently featured on Pam/Digging's blog. I've seen it in person and it's a lovely, not enormous, rose. Bet you will like it a lot!

Annie at the Transplantable Rose

[Les]

It could very well be 'Blaumeise', it is sometimes sold as 'Teller Blue'. It was part of a Swiss series named after birds native to Europe. Literally translated it is Blue Tit or Blue Titmouse, so you see it would be more marketable as 'Teller Blue'.

[Pam]

Oops. 'Blue Bird' is a serrata (not a macrophylla).