We curtailed our travel--or it was curtailed for us--due to covid. Now we're starting to get out again, finding that travel is changed and so are we. We went in mid-November to San Francisco. My husband and I lived in the Bay Area, both San Francisco and Berkeley, in the 1970s, and have visited many times since.
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| Golden Gate Bridge |
Four o'clocks are flowers I've loved since childhood.
And, since I was a child, what I liked best were the seeds. Big, round with a bulge at one side, such fun to collect! You can see them in the photo below, round black shapes, for example at the base of the flower in the center.
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| four o'clocks with seeds |
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| oak, Colorado |
Purple prairie clover is a very pretty native wildflower. It stands about two feet tall (sometime 3'), in a compact clump. The flowers are light purple and it will flower all summer. Most abundant in the central Midwest, its native range included meadows in the eastern U.S. and forest gaps in the mountain West, moist grasslands in the desert Southwest, and warmer sites in southern Canada. Today, it has been planted even more widely, but its native populations in Michigan and Ohio are presumed extinct, and it is endangered in Tennessee.
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| purple prairie clover Dalea purpurea |
I've been writing this blog weekly since 2013, describing places or plants, or botanical ideas. Most weeks I include references. Reading other people's blogs as I worked on English ivy, I noted, again, that few of them include references. So why do I? Why go to that extra work?
What the references do is to show you, the reader, where I got my material. It is an academic thing, of course. But knowledge is built on knowledge. I have first-hand observations, but I get a lot of information from other people. In academia, it is important to give those people credit. Here on the internet, manners are different, but the core reason for including references is to let readers know where the information came from remains critical.
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| grapevine, as in "I heard it through the grapevine" |
If the first reason for listing references is to give credit where credit is due, the second is to be transparent about where the facts and ideas came from. That's the one I'm going to talk about.
English ivy, also called common ivy or just ivy, (Hedera helix, ginseng family, Araliaceae) is a large woody vine native to central Europe. (See last week's blog about its botany link). It was and is conspicuous, a plant most people know. The plant is big, climbing and clinging, long-lived and evergreen. All of these feature in its rich folklore.
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| leaves of English ivy, Hedera helix |
