Chinese Landscape Painters Painted What They Saw, repost

Repost from 2013

Huang Shan, Yellow Mountain, China

Books on art history tell me that landscape painting as a distinctive style first appeared in Europe in the 1500's. The Chinese have a much longer history of painting landscapes. Several landscape paintings from the 11th century survive and literary sources refer to earlier works. Here are links to two 11th century examples: Guo Xi Early Spring (1072) and Fan Kuan (10th-early 11th C), Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (scroll down).

Small Soapweed, Yucca glauca, repost

Here is another repost from 2013: Small Soapweed, Yucca glauca

Yucca glauca in flower

     Standing like candles in the prairie, flowering soapweed yuccas make a handsome display.

Why do Botanists Always Tell You the Plant Family? repost

Repost from 2013: Why Botanists Always Tell You the Plant Family

choke cherries, rose family, Rosaceae

People writing about plants are forever sticking the plant family into the discussion.

Not Always Just Plain Vanilla, repost

I am taking a break this month, reposting previously published blogs. This one is from February 2013, the first month of this blog. And, I could not resist som editing, especially giving credit to Edmond Albius for discovering vanilla needed to be cross-pollinated. 

     Good vanilla is one of my favorite flavors, and the idea of "plain vanilla," vanilla as the no-flavor flavor, has always been somehow annoying.  And it wasn't always the case.

The vanilla orchid is the plant in the middle, 
hanging down over the tree branch. (In the 
Conservatory at the Smithsonian in 
Washington D.C.)

   Vanilla is native to the Americas and although probably in use for millennia there, it only reached Europe after 1492. At that time it was a rare and highly desirable flavor.


   Vanilla comes from “beans,” long thin bean-like pods, but vanilla is not at all a bean (legume, plant family Fabaceae), but an orchid (plant family Orchidaceae). In fact, it is the only orchid used as a food, or used by commerce in any other way than as ornamentals (flowers) even though there are more species of orchids than species in any other plant family, legumes and grasses included.  

Butterfly Pollination, A Quick Overview

Long ago, when plants began exploiting animals to carry pollen between flowers, they encountered butterflies. Butterfly adults fed mainly on sugar water (nectar). Flowers adapted to this by offering little cups of nectar, positioned so that a feeding butterfly would get pollen on itself--on the proboscis or face or wings, depending on the flower--which then pollinated the next flower of the same species when the butterfly moved to find more nectar there. I said "exploit" but for most flowers and butterflies it is a reasonable trade, pollen movement for food, making butterflies a major group of pollinators.

swallowtail butterfly on mint flowers