Recycle, reuse, refine

I have surfed the net and stumbled upon some fantastic art made of waste.

Like these sculptures made of broken CD's made by the Australian artist Sean Avery, found on the website Demilked.com.

And lots of amazing insects made from old electronic components, by Julie Alice Chapell, presented on her Facebook-page and on Etsy.

Electric wire is also recycled into art, like these little trees by BarbaraCCreations on Etsy

More pictures here. 

Be well, everybody!

Blurry Christmas

This morning, while it is snowing outside here in New Jersey. When you come downstairs, you are greeted by this happy tree, before it is overhung with decorations. Just lights and the greenery. Nice!

(Yes, it is meant to be blurry, that is how our eyes work in early mornings)

Stamp of the day: birch wood

Yesterday I was teaching about plant anatomy, about the cells and structures inside plants that make plants work and make them alive.  Wood is an amazing thing, made up from lignified plant cells that become hard, sturdy, and dead and can hold up giant trees through snowstorms and summer rains. Wood is dead xylem, the part of the vascular tissue that transports mostly water up into the top of the plants.  The yearly rings in wood from temperate regions are because the xylem made in spring are made from large diameter cells, lots of water is needed then.  In the summer and fall, then the xylem cells are smaller, and the tissue becomes tighter and darker, and you get the dark band for that year. 

Here are some fantastic photos of plant anatomy, and this Swedish stamp show wood from birch, which you can of course use for firewood. 

November thoughts

November.

Solen kikar försiktigt upp ovanför horisontkanten, en skogsridå av guld bländar mig. Soluppgången är långsam och vacker, precis som om solen tvekar att kliva upp. Precis som jag, som gärna ligger kvar under mitt varma täcke om morgonen. Nu kommer nordbornas svåraste tid, det är mörkt och kallt i mitt Norden. Inte kallt med gnistrande snö och rimfrost på träden, utan ett tråkigt kallt, rått och fuktigt väder, strax över nollstrecket på termometern. En lång väntan, på snön, på glänsande isar, på ljusets återkomst, på växter som återigen knoppas. Bland blåsippsbladen vilar knopparna redan och mina narcisser har långa vita rötter i krukorna. Det känns trösterikt när alla klorofyllblad ligger bruna och vissna på marken, att veta att de nya redan är färdiga för start.
     Himlen är svagt upplyst och molnen är belysta underifrån, en ljust blå himmel och mörkt grafitgrå moln, fyllda av fukt. På natten lyser stjärnorna och jag gör min resa i Karlavagnen på väg mot nästa vår.

EH

Translation by LS:

November

The sun carefully looks over the edge of the horixon, a forest drapery of gold is blinding me.  The sunrise is slow and beautiful, just as if the sun is hesitating to get up.  Like me, who would love to stay under my warm cover in the morning.  Here comes the hardest time for the scandinavians, it is dark and cold in the Nordic area. Not cold with sparkling sno and hoary frost on the trees, but a boring, cold, raw and wet weather, right above the freezing point on the thermometer.  A long wait, for the snow, for the shiny lake ice, for the return of the light, for plants that are in bud.  Below the hepatica leaves are already ready buds and my daffodils have long, white roots in their pots.  It feels promising when all the chlorophyllic leaves are brown and weathered on the ground to know that the new leaves are ready to start. 
    The sky is barely lit and the clouds are colored from beneath, a light blue sky and dark graphite grey clouds, filled with moisture.  During the night the stars shine and I travel with the Big Dipper towards the next spring.

Back again! Periodical cicadas in NJ

In 2004, during our wedding here in New Jersey, was one of the outbursts of the periodical cicadas, which has a 17-year life cycle. They were everywhere!  They were part of the "Great Eastern Brood", the largest of the populations.

This year another brood of these noisy insects are back, and we have just started to hear a few in the forests this passed week.  It doesn't seem to matter if it is daytime, dusk, dawn, or night - they go on making noise on and off regardless of light or not.  They sound like this. This is called the 'East Coast Brood', and these insects have been living underground on tree roots since 1996. Amazing!

 

 They are easy to tell apart from the regular cicadas because they are black with red eyes, the regular cicadas here are green, and the periodical cicadas hatch earlier in the season. 

Stamps of the Day: Birches (Betula, björk)

Birches for me is a real spring sign - small tiny leaves coming out in spring green, and in Sweden we have a saying "the birch leaves are the size of mouse ears', that is the sign of spring.  The leaves on our birches are not out yet here in New Jersey but I can feel it coming.  The hazelnut shrubs are about to flower, and then the birches come soon after.  Finally spring (well, we still have freezing at night), and it feel like this winter has been too long.  The stamps are from Sweden and Finland, and all for feature the birch tree (Betula is the genus, and it is in the family Betulaceae). 

Stamp of the Day: tulip tree

For those of you that still wonder how an American tulip tree looks like (since all you saw was a brown fruit in my end of 2012 post), here it is on a Swedish (!) stamp.  This tall tree has large, yellow flowers that look a little bit like a tulip, but is related to magnolias.  In Sweden this tree only grows in botanical gardens, and the stamp was issued in honor of the Botanical Garden in Lund in southern Sweden.  We have these trees all around in the forest here around us.  The colonialists in North America used this plant against fevers and malaria.  The first time I saw one was at Kew Gardens in London and I thought then that it was named after the shape of the leaves.  I had yet to see the flowers, which are even more tulip-like. Liriodendron tulipifera, at your service!

October skies

(I wrote this in October while driving to work, but forgot to post it until now. There should be a photo from the Delaware-Raritan Canal path with this, but that seem to have been lost. I think you might be able to imagine this anyway. )

October skies have high ceilings.
Suddenly there is light again in the forest.
Dark tall trees stand naked, with ther leafy clothes on the forest floor.
Gold, amber, umbra shimmer along suddenly invisible paths.
Pure iceblue sky.
A red, red maple holds fast against frost and fall storms, but even it will give up its foliage.
Despite destruction, death and decay this is a happy time.
We are tired of hot, humid and hellish summers, the overbearing greenishness of if all.
The overabundance of tomatoes, zucchinis, and peppers.
It is a time for a pause, a piece of rest.
Brown branches reach out in October air, filled with spores, smells of soils and moisture, and interveawed by glittering spiderwebs.
We are all prepared for November now.

"pics, or it didn't happen" - snow storm in October in NJ, USA

These photos are from a week ago, last Sunday.  What a weekend.  Snowstorm, no power, in the middle of a gorgeous autumn. The peppers were rescued from the garden on Saturday morning, by Saturday afternoon everything was white and you could hear crashing trees and branches everywhere around you. Sunday morning we woke up to blue sky, sunshine, and wintry glistening snow, and a giant mess.  Power was restored Monday, which was sooner than I expected based on all the tree damage.  Our roads to our house were also opened on Monday afternoon, when the trees and power lines had been fixed. Our gasoline generator made sure we had power for the well, furnace, and fridge and freezers.

Nearly all our trees got severe damage, with the most damage on the maples, lilacs, and Metaseqouia (dawn redwood).  There were branches down over our driveway, mailbox, truck, deck, and walkways...  Most of these photos are from the day after, which felt like a crisp day in February, not October...

Conclusion, it did happen: More photos here.

The sounds of fallI(ing)

The rustles in the forest floor's leaves when the gray squirrels are rustling for fallen hickory nuts.

The screeches of the bluejays, drumming of wood peckers and twitters of chickadees comes from the bird kingdom.

The soft touching of once-green leaves on the trees, now yellow, orange, brown, rust and red, and about to drop dead.

Wet soft splashing sounds from the little brook, which was dry most of the summer and then a roaring feast during hurricane Irene.

Silent wind bends the grasses, little bluestem, purpletop, and other species, and bears the cut-out black shapes of turkey vultures on the sky screen.

Fall is here, slowly enveloping nature and changing it, inevitable.  It is gorgeous.

OK snapshot: Fall flurry

"If I only had more speed..."
(from Stockholm, Sweden)

Stamp of the Day: Finnish Birches

You rarely see stamps of these shapes, which only have become possible after we got self-sticking stamps that you no longer have to rip off a sheet along a holed line. And you rarely see stamps that feature such small botanical details as these two Finnish stamps of birch (björk, Betula in Latin).  The young bud and then the seeds in their catkin, ready to disperse in the wind.  Stamps really have changed, from the old time-consuming engraving and printing and licking, to the printed stamps from photos on sticky paper.  I like both types, but I think the older are really more like art and these feel more like quick mass-production.

Failed ad: cat tails

Maybe I am a stickler, one that loves things to be correct too much, but ads, news, and writings that get things botanically or scientifically really wrong bothers me tremendously.  Such as this ad for allergy medication Singulair.  Someone came up with the great idea to base an ad on 'cattails or cat tails'.  Well, if only... cattails, the plant (Typha), was allergenic (it is not or only mildly so), or looked like a grass (it does not). The photo is of a grass (timothy probably, Phleum, also sometimes called 'cat's-tail', but that is not common knowledge) spreading its pollen.  Having a common cattail plant there wouldn't have been a great design, I guess... So now, readers of this ad think that 1) cattails are allergens, and 2) look like grass, because of this miseducation from Merck.  Sorry guys, this will be one of my prime examples of lack of botanical knowledge in the advertising community. Embarrassing. 'Pinsamt', as we say in Swedish.  Would anybody put a sheep in an ad and call it a pig?  Didn't think so. But that is what happened here, but with plants.

Oh, no, it is not just this ad, I just found some more with similar issues.  They are doing the same thing with thistles (not allergens), and willows ('catkins', true, but not allergens either...).  This is like when people think they are allergic to goldenrods because they happen to flower at the same time as the ragweeds.... 

My son's allergy doctor didn't like when I asked her exactly which weeds my son was allergic too, because all she could say was 'weeds', that is what was written on the test results.  Same with 'trees', another positive allergy test.  I tried to explain to her that insect-pollinated plants didn't have large amounts of wind-dispersed pollen, so not all weeds and trees are allergenic...  Why are we letting ourselves be dumbed down in the flow of information? Isn't it better to know the truth even if it is slightly more complicated? Or am I just a cranky scientist?

Stamp of the Day: Boreal Forest

This is a stamp of a typical Swedish or Finnish spruce forest (granskog).  Dark, with mushrooms (except these seem to grow a bit to high up on the stem!). Moss on the forest floor, moist air, shades, and mosquitoes. Looking at this stamp brings back many memories of hikes through trailless forests looking for chanterelles, boletus, or just a lost trail.  Sometimes a birch or aspen shows up among the spruces.  Of course a real old natural spruce forest would have been a mix of species, but these days many of the spruce forests are planted decades ago and are near monocultures as part of the forestry industry.  (Finnish stamp - Suomi is Finland in Finnish).

Tree puzzle

This non-real resin-based split-sawed tree-trunk art-piece called Billion was just featured on Core 77 and was made by Vincent Kohler.  Interesting.  But I found myself looking and looking at the cuts and parts and I don't think those parts can be fit into a circular shape.  There are too many of the small square pieces to the central-right below the central trunk, don't you think? I think that if you take all the pieces and glue them back together, there will be too much wood in the bottom right corner.  No? Yes? Fascinating.  (Photo by Geoffrey Cottenceau)

Comments during tree decorations

Swedish christmas tree decorations, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

- I bet our tree is the only one in New Jersey with mushrooms on it, says daughter.
- Mom, how can mushrooms grow straight out of branches, says son.
- Because they are endophytic and can grow inside the branches until the fruiting body comes out, says the botanical mom.

(Of course the red and white fly agaric never grows endophytically, only in the soil, but who cares? It is Christmas! And Swedes love to decorate with replicas of poisonous mushroom at Christmas time, :). )

Preparing for winter

The trees are falling. This was a very big one, several hundred years old and the standing stump is a lot taller than I am. It must have been a big crash when it fell in a storm this fall. Those splinters are made for giants.

The mosses are shedding their spores.

The squirrels are getting the hickory nuts out of their husks.

All photos are from our walk this Friday at the Hutcheson Memorial Forest, a great little gem in NJ.

Primary colors are here again!

Fall is here, still, no snow yet! (Which is good, because my basil is still growing and flowering, see leftmost photo). The Japanese lady beetles are invading our house, thousands are aggregating in corners and crevices, inside and outside. Annoying little bugs! And the leaves are continuing their turning, orange maple and the appropriately named burning-bush. We are having gorgeous days mixed with rain storms.. typical fall weather. No rain tonight, good for LA who has no window in his room (it was lifted out and being painted).

Fallen leaves and fruits

September höjer sitt tak.
Det ligger en lättnad i luften
som hör hösten till.
Den kalla blötdaggen tvättar
grundligt allt den vidrör.
Äppelvinden spelar krocket
på övergivna lekplaner.
Fallfrukten rullar stötvis in
under bågar av gräs.

Harry Martinson, ur De tusen dikternas bok (2004)

The Swedish author and poet Harry Martinson is untranslatable since he is using words in new ways and meanings and invents new words by combining and changing them. My translation below only translates the meaning, not the beauty of this poem, unfortunately. The photo is by OK, taken today, of fallen maple leaves in Sweden. Seasons are a'changing...

September is raising its ceiling.
There is a relief in the air
that is typical for fall.
The cold wet dew washes
thoroughly everything it touches.
The apple wind plays crochet
on abandoned playgrounds.
The fallen fruit rolls bumpily
under bent arches of grass.

Spring is in the air!

And it is early February. One day freezing cold with snow everywhere, and the next it is 15 degrees Celsius and feels like May. There will be winter backlash, I am sure, but this is nice!


(flowering dogwood, photo by LS)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PAPPA!