Category: Plants
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Failed replication and a germination mystery
In “The Nature of Oaks”, Doug Tallamy suggests an experiment: To be fair to worm catchers, many of the inhabitants of oak leaf litter are barely visible to the naked eye even though they are everywhere you look. But there is an easy way to observe some of the larger arthropods in the litter beneath…
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Murdannia audreyae
I’m thinking of my aunt Audrey again today. In my previous post, I talked about a succulent named for both her and my uncle Bob, Kalanchoe fadeniorum. But she also has a plant named by Bob just for her, another one they discovered together: Murdannia audreyae. You can see a couple photos of it on…
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Kalanchoe fadeniorum
My uncle Bob is a botanist. Tonight he told me one small thing I want to remember. He has multiple plants named for him, but of all those, he said, Kalanchoe fadeniorum holds a special place for him because, unlike the others, it is named for both him and his wife Audrey (Archive). The ones…
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Sprouts
Two sets of sprouts that have popped in recently in our home nursery, representing extremes of germination times: Telegraph weed (Heterotheca grandiflora), sowed October 28 this year; I noticed the first sprouts on November 1, just four days after sowing. The photo below is from November 5th. I saw them blooming on El Monte on…
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Fried hummingbird sage
Antonio Sanchez sketches a recipe for fried hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) in Eating CA! Using Edible Plants in Your Diet and Garden (2021): “take the bigger leaves and then… for about 20 to 30 seconds… fry them… turn them over a few times… then you can crack a little bit of salt a little bit…
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A couple old Phyla nodiflora specimens
Phyla nodiflora is one of the most aggressive plants I’ve encountered, I think quintupling in size in the few months we’ve had it. Jepson raises some questions about whether it’s actually native to California: “Note: Questionably native; variation in leaf margin, leaf hairiness may reflect multiple introductions from elsewhere, including South America.” The presenter in…
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Four flowers visited by a hummingbird
While I was sitting in our yard just a little while ago, a green hummingbird visited four plants in bloom in our yard. Earlier I had seen a hummingbird — the same bird? — making loops, flying nearly straight up into the air, higher than a nearby three story building, then diving down, making a…
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Muwekma Ohlone Garden at Monta Loma Elementary
When I first heard about the Castro Mound in the Monta Loma neighborhood and its subsequent destruction, I was further saddened to learn that there’s no marker acknowledging it. Now there is a memorial though, in the form of a garden, the new Living Classroom Muwekma Ohlone Garden at Monta Loma Elementary. I was happy…
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Burr medic tastes starchy
A little over a week ago, inspired by an interesting talk on weeds at the Garden Club of Los Altos, I kept some of the burr medic (Medicago polymorpha) I pulled from a school garden and brought it home to cook. Unlike small melilot (Melilotus indicus), which I also tried recently, burr medic grows low…
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Small melilot flowers taste like snap peas
Helping with weeding a Living Classroom garden today, we pulled up a lot of what Seek tells me is small melilot: I nabbed a few of the plants we pulled to give eating it a try: One source said the flowers are edible so I decided to start with them: I tried a few of…