Tales from the Microbial Laboratory

~leaf-reading~

~~~~~

I was wondering tonight if one could read leaves like one reads a human palm.

I was wondering what the leaf would tell us.

(Perhaps the leaf would tell us that humans attend too many meetings, and that if they stopped attending them, that they might be happier.  That they would then have more time to enjoy the sunshine and feel a singular breeze as it passes through town).

(But that's awfully human-centric of me.  There is a chance, and a hopeful one, that the leaf is not thinking about humans at all).

~~~~~

~a Queen and an olive~

~~~~~

Night-blooming Jessamine, Cestrum nocturnum.

Or...Raat ki Rani (Queen of the night) in Hindi.

I've read where it's a perennial to zone 8, 8b or 9 - and I'm zone 8b, so I'm hopeful that they'll survive our mild winters (it may dieback, but hopefully will return).

It's considered invasive in some tropical areas.  I can't imagine a more lovely invasive.

The fragrance in the late, late evening is just wonderful - mild, lingering - it 'wafts' more than oozes.  Does that make sense?

~~~~~

This is a less than good image of my tea olive, Osmanthus fragrans - a once upon a time plant of about a foot tall, planted at the base of my side deck - that now is about 15-18 feet tall.  Now it looks more a small tree than a shrub, and when the weather cools, and it starts blooming - it's fragrance fills my entire garden.  At it's base are 5-6 foot stalks of the fall-blooming forsythia sage, Salvia madrensis - and to it's right is the texas mountain laurel, Sophora secundiflora. 

~~~~~

On difficult days, difficult Mondays filled with meetings that remind one of circular conversations, realities that make one wish to sit in the lab's parking lot, watching the clouds float by - on days when one grows weary of listening to the news, weary of the chaos - yes, on such days one feels grateful for the perfume of the tea olive, for the lingering scent of the Queen of the Night - grateful for these remarkably sane and undemanding fragrances, greeting one as they arrive home. 

~Farfugiums~

~~~~~

This morning, early, I was out with the dogs - and we were all greeted by a rush of fragrance being held in place by a light fog:  the tea olive is in bloom, it is a new season - summer is officially over and the garden is a refreshing place once more.

Plus, happily, we have had rain.  Several good rains - and as I looked around I realized that over the past month or so, we have had regular rainfall, something we haven't really had in a year or more.  The garden has responded:  the buds are swelling on the camellias, the Farfugiums are going nuts, and the all of the vines, well all I can say about the vines is that if I don't give them some attention soon, they'll swallow up a few things (including the house).

~~~~~

So, as for Farfugium sp. - I really like them.  Alot.  My first three joined the garden in June of 2007, when I was hunting around for larger groundcovers that tolerate light shade (such as dappled shade under a live oak canopy).  I would have considered them slow growers - until the rainfall of last week, and then I had to remind myself how unusually dry we have been for some time now.  They obviously like more rainfall (which I should have recalled, since I had first read they were native to wet areas), and have responded gratefully:  Farfugium japonicum 'Crispatum' (above), Farfugium japonicum 'Gigantea' (at the top of the post), and Farfugium japonicum 'Aureomaculatum' (below).  Mine aren't flowering yet - last year the 'Crispatum' flowered in late fall (small yellow flowers) - but I can't say much about the flowers of the others (yet).

The leaves on my 'Gigantea' are these gorgeous large (about 12" across) shiny things - I can't wait until this one spreads a bit (it's actually grown quite a bit since I brought the small 4" pot home from Pete's), and I do think I might try to find a few more to add to the garden.  They're quite striking, and contrast nicely with the more traditional foliage of the hydrangeas and camellias and azaleas in the front shade garden.

I would have to say, as of now, that 'Gigantea' and Crispatum' are my favorites.  There seem to be several with wonderfully ruffled leaves - Plant Delights Nursery has one they call 'Bad Hair Day', and another called 'Shishi Botan'.      

~~~~~

Also back in June of 2007 I got a Farfugium japonicum 'Aureomaculatum'.  Honestly?  I'm not too fond of it (yet).  It also looks a bit better with the rain - but it just hasn't impressed me thus far, and I can't help it but think that the little yellow 'blotches' are some kind of disease (aren't sometimes this kind of variagation viral in nature?) - anyway, I'll try and be patient - I know that I won't remove it from the garden, but we'll see if it will entice me to divide it or purchase new ones in the future.

~~~~~

I also need to think a bit about this one.  I succumbed to an image of it last spring over at Plant Delights Nursery - Farfugium japonica 'Kaimon Dake', so it's been in the garden for only about six months.  I had been disappointed of late because the leaves had lost their beautiful varigation (slowly, throughout the summer) - but when I went back to the PDN website, it states that the aging foliage turns green (which actually helps the overall vigor of the plant) - so it's the new foliage that has the varigation.  Okay then.  For this one, I'll see what spring brings - and be hopeful.  For now it looks healthy - so I'll settle for that.

~~~~~

I supposed I'm all Farfugiumed out now.   

~these guys just have it too easy this election~

Hilarious, once again.

~~~~~

~about a 'worm', or so my student says~

~work~

~~~~~

What is it about fading zinnia flowers that I love so much? 

The fading color, almost melting back to green (where it all began), the petals - nibbled on by God-knows-what, a flower's resilience at the end of a long day?

All of those things I suppose, and more - unrecognizable, unknowing things.

I just know that I love them.

~~~~~

Last evening I attended a reading at Ashley Hall by the poet Thomas Lux.  The lab was first introduced to Lux by Katherine when she read us the poem Refrigerator, 1957 one day back in January during lab meeting - and Katherine and I both smiled last night when Lux read that poem first.   It was interesting to see the poet himself read this poem:  he read it with much more humor, in a voice more dramatic than the voice he spoke with between poems.  It changed the poem for me, and I found myself, for the first time - feeling like the poet was getting in the way of the poem, as if he was reading it in a way that controlled my view of it.  Does this make sense?  I discussed this a bit with Katherine today - I hadn't experienced this before.  That said - the evening was wonderful - I mean, these poems!  They resonate - his fascination with biology, his observation of the everyday, his comments about teaching - and his obvious passion for the process of sharing what he knows with future poets.  At the end, a person asked him about where he finds his inspiration, and he told us that he disliked that word - that really, what it was all about was work, hard work - and how each poem was the culmination of as many as 15 revisions that sometimes took a year or more - years.  He went on to talk about attentiveness, and I feel as if I recall him quoting the 17th century French priest, theologian, and philosopher, Nicolas Malebranche: 'Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.'  Our hard work, our attention to things - and as I think of this I look around at the pile of papers and drafts of manuscripts in front of me, and know that I need to take heed, to settle in, and to enter into a period of very hard and focused work.  I need to quit waiting for inspiration, for the vision I so often joke about - I need to simply work.

For more about Lux, you might enjoy his interview in the New York Times back in 1998, or this one at The Cortland Review in 1999.  There's much more out there about him.  Last night he mentioned several more recent interviews - one in the New York Times magazine, but I couldn't dig it up - and tonight I don't have the patience to see it through (Oh!  Wait - there is a recent audio interview, by John Stoehr, over at the Charleston City Paper).  So - I will leave you with a poem from his latest book, and one that he read to us last evening.  But there are so many more wonderful poems - it wasn't easy to select just one, but I need to take dogs outside in the darkness, all of us happy to feel the cool winds once again.

The Joy Bringer by Thomas Lux (from God Particles, 2008) 

breaks the light through the oak leaves at dawn.

The joy-bringer injects the red bird's red.

The joy-bringer brings the green, lets the cup runneth over

into a saucer, from which you can sip.

Gives fish the river, the river the fish.

If by two inches you avoid a piano

falling on your head

and later at the hospital fall in love with the doctor

who removes a few splinters

of ivory and black piano lacquer

from your left calf: the joy-bringer.

arranged that Also the chilled artesian water

spilling from a pipe only two inches above the ground,

from which you drank on your hands and knees,

on a few boards or branches, you bowed in the muck and drank

that sweet cold reaching-up,

you drank among the skunk cabbage, ferns, a small brook

at your bade again, guess what,

the joy-bringer! In fact, let us praise

the joy-bringer for these seven

things: i) right lung, 2) left lung, 3) heart, 4) left brain,

5) right brain, 6) tongue, 7) the body to put them in.

Thank you, joy-bringer!

And thanky, thanky too for just-mown-hay,

cut an inch from its roots

to bleed its perfume into the air!

~~~~~

~a hedychium~

~~~~~

This late-blooming Hedychium sp. is covered in brilliant orange blooms this morning - another of the south's unique ways to welcome in Autumn.

It was in the low 60s this morning in my neck of the woods:  Dan went outside and ran in a million or more circles, Stanley chased the neighbor cat up into a tree, I pulled out florida betony (just starting to grow again, unfortunately) from the japanese irises.

~~~~~

And oh yes - the lab.  I need to go to the lab.   

Early Morning in Mid (to late?)-September (in Zone 8b)

My garden has the look of one that has been neglected - wild purple morning glory (Ipomoea cordatotriloba) is wrapping itself around everything it shouldn't:  the bronze fennel, the lingering tomato vines, the self-sown mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia).  This morning I watched one bee fly to about fifty or more morning glory flowers - stopping for only a second or two at each - it's body dusted in pollen.  After a busy summer and a hot August, I am wandering back into the garden - and while my initial (peer pressure-induced reaction) is to grimace at the wildness, the truth is that I love my garden just as it is on this eve of the Autumnal Equinox. 

~~~~~

If there was any overarching theme of the morning -it was how many flowers were honored (or in the case of one holly, dishonored) by the presence of a guest or two (or thousands).  The large savannah holly, the one that is visited by a flock of cedar waxwings each fall - has a split trunk, and one of them, close to the base, was covered in a fine web.  When I looked up - I saw that it went almost up to the top of the tree, 15 feet or so - and when I disturbed the webbing, underneath were thousands of spider mites (at least I think they were spider mites).  So I did what any self-respecting trying-to-be-organic person would do:  I took the hose and sprayed the webbing off of the tree trunk.  Who knows what it'll be like in a week or so - I'll have to remember to look.

The other thing I noticed, also associated with the Savannah Holly tree - was that at the base of the tree were tiny gall-like structures.  I hadn't noticed them before.  I suppose I'll need to do a bit of research to see what is going on here (you know, in all of my spare time).

~~~~~

Otherwise, most of the visitors seemed less than hostile - a green tree frog hanging out in the flower of a Cucurma alismatifolia 'Thai Supreme', a tiny spider (most likely a green lynx spider, Peucetia viridans) on the mexican sunflower - the long-tailed skipper moth (Urbanus proteus) on the wild purple morning glory - and all over, there were gulf fritillaries flying around, and their caterpillars, munching on the leaves of the passion vine.

   

~~~~~

I guess the other obvious gardening activity going on was...rambling.  Cypress vine that reseeded in the asparagus bed - crawling up and around the newly planted (as of spring) purple passion asparagus.  The wild purple morning glory was everywhere - crawling up the remaining tomato vines of the Sungold cherry, which is now producing new, perfectly formed clusters of green tomatoes.  The blue sky vine has covered the front fence - and if I was a more confined gardener, I'd call it invasive and tear it out (instead, I'll continue to enjoy the flowers and live in denial that it is climbing up into the ash tree in the front of the fence).

~~~~~

    

~Ketner for Congress~

I live in the 1st District...

...and I'm supporting 1st Congressional District candidate Linda Ketner.

Please head over to XARK to read about her opponent, Henry Brown - and a recent article in The State.  Here' a bit of what XARKer Dan Conover had to say:

The facts in the story are enough to make any fair-minded person cringe: Our Congressman set a national forest on fire by doing a lousy job of controlling a controlled burn on some of his rural property; when he couldn't get the fine reduced, he filed a frivolous countersuit against the forest service for damages in an alleged incident years before; and by the time his case finally reached resolution, his $1,000 reduction wound up costing taxpayers about $100,000 in Forest Service staff time.

Boy, talk about needing a change.  You can read more about it here at Daily Kos in the post Focus on...South Carolina!!!

(And I had one of those weird dinners too, Dan - at Circa 1886 - that was both hilarious and c-r-e-e-p-y.  A friend, who invited me, not only have Henry Brown at the table, but also Arthur Ravanel.  It was a pretty unusual evening...as one might imagine.)

~a Saturday morning~

What a perfect Saturday morning - cloudy, breezy - wonderfully cool.

The mint is blooming away beneath the canopy of a cluster of roses - Blossomtime, Marie Parvie, Mutabilis, Souvenir de la Malmaison, Heritage, Abraham Darby - even on this cool day the bees are everywhere.

I can't decide this morning who is happier:  the dogs or the garden.  I'll have to say it is a tie.

[Or me.  I'm in town, home - and I plan to jump into the garden and accomplish a few things today (such as make it appear less abandoned).  I also need to get my fall garden planted, and soon.]