Top 16 PATSP posts of 2011

2011 was a weird year for my relationship with the blog, which I've recently described -- ad nauseam -- so coming up with this list was a stranger experience than usual. I had a lot of good stuff at the beginning of the year, I think, and then basically nothing after July. But it was a very good year for photos, and if pressed, I imagine I can come up with nice things to say about some of the text too. So here are the highlights of 2011:

16. Music Video: "Russian Unicorn" (Bad Lip Reading / Michael Bublé) (29 Sep 2011)


Okay, so this is kind of a cheat, 'cause I didn't have anything to do with making it. But I'm still unbelievably fond of the song,¹ and wanted another chance to say so, because it's worth repeating. Also it's my list and you can't stop me.


15. Wednesday morning Marcia, Jan, and Cindy picture (25 May 2011)


Don't know what became of Marcia, Jan, and Cindy, of course: no way to tell them apart from any other robin,² and the odds are unfortunately high that they didn't all survive to the fall. (The deck is stacked against robins to a surprising degree.) But one hopes. Same for barn swallows Greg, Peter, and Bobby, though we didn't get as much time to get to know them.


14. Random plant event: Breynia disticha 'Roseo-Picta' blooming (8 Aug 2011)


I'm not sure why this one makes it into the top posts post. I think I'm maybe just pleased by how strange the flowers are, and how well the photos turned out. Breynia turns out to be just full of surprises (if you bother to feed it), as you'll see later this year if I ever get it together to sort some photos.


13. In Which I Lose All Respect for the Burgess Seed and Plant Co. of Bloomington, IL (3 Mar 2011)


Not that I had a lot of respect to begin with. Included in the list mostly because "This Ficus is my god now!" still makes me chuckle.


12. Fungus Gnats: Like Puppies That Try To Fly Up Your Nose (15 Mar 2011)


I feel a little bad about writing a post to help people get rid of their fungus gnat infestations, 'cause I actually find fungus gnats kind of adorable.


11. Random plant event: Kalanchoe tomentosa flower (14 Jun 2011)


Not a fan of the plant (more accurately: they're not fans of me), but I hadn't seen the flowers before, and the photos turned out nicer than I'd expected.


10. Storm Review: 2011 Blizzard (2 Feb 2011)


Winter 2011-12 has been a huge disappointment so far: we've only had one snowfall of any consequence, and that snow was only around for a day or two before it all melted. But we've had good snows in the past, and winter's only 1/3 over, so there's still hope, I guess.


9. Pretty picture: Convallaria majalis flowers (23 May 2011)


It's a little too easy to take a nice picture of Convallaria majalis, actually.


8. Phalaenopsitrocity (28 Mar 2011)


2011 will be remembered as the year in which plant retailers finally gave up and decided to sell artificial plants instead.³ I don't do New Year's resolutions, never have, but if I did, I'd resolve to find a way to kill the market for dye-injected plants in 2012. All ideas welcome.⁴


7. Mary Richards and the Incredible Plant Lady (18 Feb 2011)


In which Helen Hunt is dethroned as the patron actress (possibly "actress mascot" would be more accurate? Less oxymoronic, anyway.) of PATSP and replaced by Mary Tyler Moore (with an assist from Valerie Harper).


6. Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum St. Swithin (3 Jun 2011)


Best orchid ever, yeah?


5. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Houseplant (11 Apr 2011)
I had trouble figuring out what I was trying to say with this one, or whether I was trying to say anything at all. I'm not sure I ever figured it out, actually, but my readership sure seemed to like the post anyway.


4. List: Plants Which Someone on the Internet has Said Bring Bad Luck (12 Oct 2011)


I'm not sure if the people who read this post will come away less superstitious or more superstitious. It probably depends on how superstitious they were when they started reading it: people who were already prone to see plants as lucky or unlucky now have longer lists, and people who aren't, don't. But I tried.


3. Widower (Persea americana) (16 Feb 2011)


As I explained in last year's list, I try to leave off the plant profiles when making these lists, because the point of these best-of lists is to call attention to posts readers might otherwise have missed, and I figure the profiles are already linked in the sidebar so there's no need. But, also like last year, I'm making an exception for the profile I liked the best, because giant ground sloths and gomphotheres are were kind of awesome, and more people should know about them.


2. Pretty pictures: Rime ice (12 Jan 2011)


Several kick-ass pictures at the rime post, but this particular one is probably my favorite photo for the whole year of 2011.


1. All the Rumble Among the Jungle posts (14 Sep to 15 Nov 2011)


Probably cheating to include this, too, since the Rumble wasn't a single post, and y'all did at least half the work there, but, you know, the Rumble was a big deal. It kinda has to be #1.

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¹ It may not be my favorite Bad Lip Reading song; there's like a four-way tie between "Russian Unicorn," "Black Umbrella (The Right Stuff)," "Morning Dew," and "Rockin' (All Night Long)." The one I listen to the most often, though, is "Rockin' (All Night Long)." It took a while to get into, but I listen to it all the time now.
² (Though the one that chirps with a lisp is probably Cindy.)
³ Quote from this article:

"We are an industry of plant nerds who hold our plants and Latin naming on a silver platter," says Olivia Sellards, Syngenta Flowers. "But we are first a service industry and should hold our customer demands before our personal preferences. Absolutely sell a (dyed) plant, a glittered poinsettia or a bunch of blue tie-dyed cut flowers. Remember, if they aren't buying real plants, consumers will buy fake ones."

Well. Cleeeeeeearly the solution is to blur the line between real and fake, then: take real plants and spray-paint, dye-inject, or glitter-bomb them until they look artificial. (That was my sarcastic voice, in case that was unclear.)
Also, Ms. Sellards: I care that you've created a plant that people can only enjoy once. This has nothing to do with Latin name snobbery; this is about deceiving customers and creating impossible expectations. It's fine to sell people plants they're clamoring for; my question is whether the customers know what they're getting. (I'm also upset with y'all for creating a tacky and garish product. But mostly the deceiving and the expectations-setting.)
I would also question whether it makes any sense to disparage an industry of plant sellers for holding their plants "on a silver platter." Ms. Sellards' thesis is that the plants should be . . . less important?
⁴ (#OccupyTheXylem!)

More corrections

Readers have alerted me to two more errors on PATSP, having to do with one of the profile posts and one misidentified plant. Then I ran into another thing all on my own, where something in one of the profiles needed a bit of clarification. So here we are again.

1. Ficus elastica and isoprene

In the Ficus elastica profile, I sort of implied that the people making natural rubber extract isoprene from the sap of Hevea brasiliensis and other plants, then polymerize it into natural rubber. This is not the case.

Model of isoprene. Black balls are carbon atoms, white are hydrogen, and the gray connectors represent pairs of electrons. This is my own photo: I would have used it in the Ficus elastica profile, except that I'd forgotten I owned a molecular model set.¹
Straight-up, pure isoprene can and does exist. It's a colorless, low-boiling liquid which is mostly obtained either as a byproduct of oil and naphtha refining, or by heating natural rubber until it starts disintegrating into smaller molecules. The isoprene so obtained can then be polymerized into a substance with properties very close to natural rubber.² Readers who collect oxymorons will be pleased to know that the term for this artificially polymerized, artificially obtained polyisoprene is "synthetic natural rubber."

However. Natural natural rubber polymerizes within the plant, forming small globs of polyisoprene that float around in the sap. When the sap is collected from the plant, these globs are then coagulated, washed, filtered, pressed, and stretched to form blocks of rubber. So it's still technically correct of me to say that isoprene is polymerized to form natural rubber, but the polymerization has already happened by the time the sap is collected.³

2. Persea americana toxicity

Next up, in the Persea americana profile, I devoted footnote 2 to the toxicity of the plant, saying that all parts of the plant except the fruit should be considered toxic, particularly to pets. Then Poor Richard's Almanac had to go and spoil that one for me by writing a post about the culinary use of avocado leaves.

My Persea americana, as of yesterday morning. I had two plants to begin with, and planted them together in this pot to try to make it fuller. That's mostly worked, but the two plants together seem to dry out a lot faster than they did when separated, so there have been more dropped leaves and
This sent me deep into the bowels of the internet to do research. I won't bore you with all the twists and turns, but the gist is:

Yes, people really do cook with avocado leaves.

No, not any avocado leaf will do: the variety used in Mexican cooking is a specific race of the avocado (according to some sources it's a separate species, Persea drymifolia, but others consider it just a race of P. americana).

Avocado leaves should still be considered toxic to all pets, especially especially especially to birds: ALLLLLLLLLLLL the bird-toxicity lists say Persea fruit or foliage is potentially lethal for at least some species of bird, and they say this over and over again, in extremely shrill and insistent language.

Humans don't seem to be as affected by the toxin in avocado leaves as animals are, and animals aren't all affected to the same degree. Wikipedia's article on persin, the actual toxic agent in Persea americana leaves,⁴ reports that consumption of avocado leaves produces a wide array of unpleasantness in a whole barnyard full of animals (cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, mice, cows, goats, horses, pigs, sheep, ostriches, chickens, turkeys and fish), ranging from reduced milk production all the way up to asphyxia and death. (Wikipedia's original source is a bit more detailed, q.v.)

The way to tell whether you have one of the cooking-type avocado leaves or the useless and/or poisonous avocado leaves: leaves which are okay to cook with will smell like anise, and the fruits will have much thinner skin. Generally, if you start an avocado plant from a supermarket fruit's seed, you're not going to end up with leaves you can cook with.

So I was partly wrong: a subset of avocado plants have leaves which are not toxic, at least not in the small quantities needed to flavor food. (I don't recommend sitting down and eating ten leaves in one sitting, even if it is the drymifolia variety.) In the context of a houseplant that was started from a supermarket avocado, though, you're better off treating it as toxic. Even if it doesn't hurt you, it's not likely to do anything for your food.

3. Aloe aristata isn't Aloe aristata

Finally, I've found out from Taylor Holzer (a reader) that I've been calling the below plant Aloe aristata when it is in fact a hybrid of Aloe aristata and something else.

My Aloe aristata x whatever, in January 2011.
The most likely candidate, I think, is Gasteria batesiana, which cross is called Gasteraloe x beguinii, but a similar hybrid is formed by A. aristata and A. variegata, and I'll probably never know for sure which cross I have.

A. aristata is apparently distinguishable by the dead tips on the ends of the leaves, and the thinner, less fleshy leaves. (I'd thought that maybe the differences just depended on cultural conditions -- since I'm not growing them outdoors, a lot of my plants don't look quite like they ought to. But sadly, no.) It's also reluctant to offset, is the rumor, whereas my plant offsets more or less constantly. My guesses about the actual ancestry are based both on Holzer's own guesses and on this discussion thread at davesgarden.com.

Aloe aristata hybrid (L), Aloe aristata species (R). Photo credit: Taylor Holzer. Used by permission.
I will go through the blog and change the name at some point, but I just finished a few rounds of name-changing, and am pretty sick of it, so it might take me a while. (It's bad enough that I have to go change two profiles.) Since some of you got offsets of this plant from me, though, I figured I should let you know that it was half-misidentified.

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Photo credits: Mine except where noted.

¹ Yes, I am that nerdy. In fact, it's actually quite a bit worse than you think, because I don't just have a molecular model set, I have six, which were purchased between my senior year of high school and my sophomore year of college. (The first one, in high school, was I think actually a birthday or Christmas present from Mom and Dad, but I think I bought the other five. It's been a while; some of the details are fuzzy.) So I can model anything up to about 80 carbon atoms. Here is a short segment of a natural rubber (cis-polyisoprene) molecule, for example:


² It's not exactly the same as natural rubber because natural rubber contains impurities from the original sap: fatty acids, proteins, inorganic compounds ("ash"), that sort of thing.
³ (If you want to be even more technical: the plants don't polymerize isoprene, but its phosphorylated form.)
⁴ Regrettably, in the course of editing this post, I lost a "persin"/"person" pun I was very proud of. I could put it here anyway, but it was context-dependent and wouldn't be funny without the set-up. I just wanted you to know.

Widower (Persea americana)

One of the fundamental problems long-lived plants have to solve is where to propagate themselves. When is not as much of a problem -- you live a long time; if you don't reproduce this year, well, there's always next -- and both why and how are pretty much decided for you already: it's going to be a seed,¹ and you do it or else your whole species is going to go extinct. But where?

If you just let the seeds drop, your next generation is in a decent spot -- you know this because you have managed to live there for however long it's been. However, this also means that your children are going to be competing with you for water and minerals, and you're likely to shade them so much that they won't be able to get any light, and will struggle to get going at first, which will lead some of them to early deaths. Or maybe they'll outcompete you and lead to your early death. Either way, not terribly appealing.

You could set your seeds free to float on the wind, or drop them into a body of water, to float around until they hit a suitable spot: this ensures that at least some of them will wind up far enough away from you that they're not going to compete with you. However, most wind-borne seeds will land in places where they can't grow (too salty, too wet, too rocky, too dry, etc.), and water-borne seeds are mainly going to travel in a single direction -- either around the edge of the lake or downstream. Water travel is nice in that you know that there will be water waiting for the seeds when they get wherever they're going, but it's also very limiting, in terms of total land space: sooner or later, you're trying to drop seeds around the same lake shore that your relatives are already circling, or down the same stream that's nothing but root-to-root you up and down the banks already.

Two varieties of Persea americana fruit: the black one is I think a Hass; the green is a "Slimcado," a variety that's supposed to have 1/3 less fat than . . . something. I don't think the sticker actually said what it has 1/3 less fat than.
Finally, you can take advantage of something more mobile than yourself, which is what the avocado (Persea americana) decided to do. The fruits are calorie-rich, so anything that can eat them² gets a good reward for doing so. They even fall off the tree before they're ripe and then ripen on the ground, which is more convenient if your seed distributor doesn't climb. And the seed is (relatively) huge, hard, and rounded, so it easily survives passage through a large animal's gastrointestinal tract, which as a bonus means that the seed starts its life in a moist, nutrient-rich pile of dung.

If you're an avocado, then, it would seem that you have life all figured out, and you can just lay back and enjoy the rewards of your cleverness while your partner distributes your seeds for you. Right?

Well, you could, if only you hadn't picked this guy to be your seed-carrier:


That's a ground sloth,³ and they went extinct in North and South America about 10,000 years ago, give or take.⁴ But that's okay, 'cause you've got a back-up:

Photo by Leonard G., from Wikipedia.
Oh, shit.

That's a gomphothere, the New World answer to the elephant,⁵ which also started to go extinct around 10,000 years ago,⁶ though the gomphotheres stuck it out quite a while longer -- possibly lasting until as recently as 6000 years ago.

As far as I know, there is no hard evidence to show that either of these animals was definitely the distributor of Persea seeds, but there aren't a lot of candidates: whatever distributed avocados had to be a pretty big animal, because all indications are that they're supposed to be swallowed whole. There are only so many animals big enough to do that at the right spot in the fossil record. It's an educated guess.

Whatever it was, if not the sloths or the gomphotheres, went just as extinct as they did, so the central point remains unchanged. So the widow part of the "person" for this plant is because Persea has lost an animal partner, so to speak. The reason why he's a widower, and not a widow, is because the Nahuatl people of Mexico, who stepped in to take the gomphotheres' and sloths' place,⁷ chose the name for the plant that wound up sticking: ahuacatl, which means, in the Nahuatl language, "testicle."⁸

Fruits on a tree outdoors. Photo by B.navez, via Wikipedia.
No two sources agree on exactly where or when human domestication of the avocado first began, but Wikipedia says the first evidence of avocado use dates to 10,000 BC, and organized human domestication began roughly 8000-9000 years ago. There's also some confusion about the geographic origin of the species, with some sources putting the original range from Central America north to the Rio Grande River and south to Peru, and Wikipedia locating it specifically in the state of Puebla, Mexico. I'm not going to go into the history of avocado cultivation or the peculiarities of cross-pollinating avocados or any of that, nor am I going to talk about how wonderful and delicious they are,⁹ or how nutritious, or how easy to grow outdoors, or any of that, because dammit, this is a houseplant blog and we have to get to the houseplant stuff.

I suspect that most indoor gardeners eventually wind up trying to grow an avocado from seed. Seeds are easy to get, and easy to sprout, so it's sort of a logical thing to try.

Nobody, as a result, tries to sell them as houseplants, though I have my suspicions that a clever enough marketer could probably pull it off: the leaves are a nice, slightly metallic green, and they're not particularly difficult to grow. A new name, maybe a slightly dwarfed habit (either a small-statured variety or a regular variety that's been chemically dwarfed), some kind of made-up legend about them being lucky,¹⁰ and I think a grower could have a hit. The only thing that keeps them from being grown more indoors, I think, is that indoor-grown plants tend not to look that great. But mass-production in Florida and proper pruning of the young plants would take care of that problem, too. I really do think there's money in this idea somewhere.

PROPAGATION: The usual way one starts an avocado is, one removes the seed from the center of a supermarket-bought fruit, washes it off in running water (no soap), suspends it pointed-end-up with toothpicks over a glass of water, puts the whole thing in a warm, sunny spot, and waits for it to split open and begin to sprout.

Seeds suspended in water with toothpicks. Photo by KVDP, from Wikipedia.
This method is fairly straightforward, though there are ways to do it wrong. You should change the water regularly, lest the seed start to rot. Opinions differ on exactly how often to change the water: I'm inclined to say at least once a week, though some sources say once every few weeks. More often is better than less often. You should also maintain the water level more or less constant at about halfway up the seed: don't submerge it completely, and don't let all the water evaporate so the seed dries out.

But you don't have to do it like that. You can also start it directly in soil. If it's decent soil and you keep it moist (not waterlogged: moist) for long enough, in a warm, sunny spot, just under the surface of the soil, that's supposed to work just as well. I've started one in soil before, but that sort of doesn't count: the seed had already sprouted while in the fruit. (I don't know why I didn't get a picture. Sorry.)

Either way, as long as the seeds never dry out, germination is usually pretty reliable. If I remember correctly, although the online advice is usually to wait 4-6 weeks before the sprout emerges, the one we started in water was much faster than that. And the second one didn't even wait on us to take it out of the fruit.

LIGHT: Well, the websites all say that you should give your plant as much light as you can, up to and including full sun, but the plant doesn't necessarily have to have that much: my personal plants get some sun for a few weeks in the summer, but only bright indirect light the rest of the year, and they've done fine. They're not gorgeous, and they might grow faster if they were getting more light, but the point is that they're not that particular about how much direct sun they get, so long as the light they're getting is bright.

Plants grown under lights may grow fast enough to run into the lights, which can bleach and burn the developing younger leaves, causing them to fall off. Keep some distance between artificial light and the top of your plant.

The better of my two plants, at about 11 months old.
WATER: The usual on-line advice is to keep them from ever getting really dry, but not so much that they get sopping wet either. My avocados dried out much more slowly than I was expecting when first potted up a year ago, but lately they're needing water every couple weeks. I don't feel like they're particularly fussy about when they get water, so long as I water thoroughly.

One site said that the leaves of plants which are too wet will curl under, while plants that are too dry will drop leaves. I've never seen either behavior on my plants, and it's not like I'm super-consistent with the watering, so I'm not sure I believe any of this. I have seen curled leaves on other people's plants, but I'm not convinced that this means they're too wet. (I guess if you suspect that the plant's too wet already, this might count as confirmation.)

HUMIDITY: The usual advice is to do something to boost the humidity near the plant as much as possible. I can't say my plants have ever complained about the humidity in here, but then, the humidity here is rarely all that low. If air is too dry, you may get tip burn or dropped lower leaves, though tip burn can also be caused by mineral build-up in the soil, and occasional leaf drop on an older plant is normal.

TEMPERATURE: There's a lot of debate on-line about whether or not established avocado trees, outdoors, can take a freeze or not, but I'm hoping that figuring out who's right isn't important if you're growing an avocado as a houseplant.

PESTS: Nothing in particular. I haven't had any spider mite problems on my plants, and spider mites are the pests I'd have if I were going to have pests.¹¹ Persea species are especially susceptible to a particular mite called the persea mite, but unless you live in an area where avocados are grown outdoors, persea mites aren't likely to be a problem on your plant.

The outdoor growers seem most concerned about beetles, caterpillars, and weevils, none of which are likely to be an issue inside either. Fungal diseases are more of a concern (especially if you're misting to keep humidity up, or if you water from overhead in a shower or something, like I do), and scale and mealybugs are always something to watch out for.

GROOMING: The recommendation for pruning young avocado plants is usually to wait until a stem gets about 6 inches (15 cm) long, then cut it back to 3 inches (8 cm), over and over, until the plant has branched out well. I have a hard time doing this to plants, even when I know they need it,¹² which is one problem, but the other problem is that the plants aren't always co-operative even when you do cut them back. This one, after getting cut back, grew one humongous leaf and one medium-sized leaf, didn't branch, and then stopped doing anything at all for several months:

My stubborn non-branching plant.
You'll also want to check your plant regularly to see whether it needs to be repotted: Persea doesn't like to be cramped. There seems to be general consensus that you shouldn't repot an avocado in the winter; if you can, wait until spring instead.

You're also not likely to get fruit on a plant grown indoors, though it happens occasionally on older plants, especially if they get to summer outdoors. If you do get fruit, it won't be the same kind of fruit you originally purchased.

FEEDING: Feed with a regular houseplant fertilizer at quarter-strength with every watering, or feed every three months at full-strength. The former method is more hassle for you, but probably better for the plant. Older, established plants may need more fertilizer than younger plants of the same size.

Persea is sensitive to mineral buildup and overfertilization; either can result in burnt leaf tips. (Tip burn is also a sign of low humidity, though.) Flushing the pot with a lot of distilled water or rainwater is one way to deal with this; you could also remove as much soil as possible from the roots and replace it with new soil, though that's more traumatic for the plant.

One of my references, the New World Encyclopedia, had this to say about the avocado:

There is an important interdependency between avocados and people. The plant lacks a seed dispersal technique outside of humans. It is hypothesized that it originally co-evolved with large mammals that are now extinct, such as the giant ground sloth, with these ecological partners vital to seed dispersal. New mechanisms have not evolved, but the effectiveness of human intervention has allowed the plant to prosper. Of course, in exchange for this benefit, the avocado provides a nutritional and desirable fruit for people.

This bugs me, because of course a new dispersal mechanism sure as hell has evolved, and we're it. We don't eat the fruit whole and then pass them in our . . . er, "dung," true, but Persea americana doesn't produce the same kind of fruit it used to, either. It's shuffled its genetics around and come up with a different fruit than what existed in the past, and if you don't believe me check this out:

"Criollo" avocados, the fruit of uncultivated Persea americana. Photo by Nick Saum, www.nicksaumphotography.com. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License (CC-BY-SA-3.0). Via Wikipedia.
Sure, we had a more direct and deliberate hand in the reshuffling than the sloths did, breeding them purposely to get the traits we wanted, but it's still evolution. We are part of the environment of the avocado plant, and it's changed to reproduce itself better in this new, slothless environment. Change in successive generations of an organism, over long periods of time, is what evolution is.

This also means, to extend my earlier metaphor, that the once-widowed avocado has remarried, and we're the bride. I hope this works out better for Persea than its previous marriages did.

References in no particular order:¹³

• http://www.avocadosource.com/WAC4/WAC4_p077.pdf
• http://www.thegardenhelper.com/avocado.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomphothere
• http://lancaster.unl.edu/hort/youth/Avocado.shtml
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avocado
• http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=5086
• http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Avocado
• http://www.kew.org/science-research-data/kew-in-depth/difficult-seeds/species-profiles/persea-americana/index.htm
• http://coopfoodnotes.com/co-op-talk/fresh-from-the-field-avocados-and-you-pt-1/
• http://coopfoodnotes.com/co-op-talk/fresh-from-the-field-avocados-and-you-pt-2/
• http://kgkat.tripod.com/avocado.html
• Poor Richard's Almanac post about P. drymifolia

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Photo credits: Mine unless otherwise identified in the text.

¹ Unless you're a moss, fern, or liverwort. But ew. Who'd want to be one of them?
² (EDITED:) There seems to be broad agreement that the whole plant, including the leaves and fruits, is toxic to mammals, fish, and especially birds. A lot of people reportedly feed pieces of the fruit to their pets without any problems, and it probably is safe for cats and dogs in small amounts, but I don't recommend feeding any part of the avocado to any animal, especially especially especially birds, because you can't know how your particular animal will react or how much might cause a problem, and death is definitely a possible outcome.
I didn't see much suggesting that avocado plants or fruit are dangerous to humans as a group, though some individuals have allergies to the fruit. Humans don't appear to be very sensitive to the actual toxin in avocados (called persin, from the genus name Persea), but children would probably be more strongly affected, so do treat the plant like it's poisonous if you have kids around.
One particular variety of avocado, which depending on the source is either a subspecies (P. a. drymifolia) or species (P. drymifolia), is used in cooking in Mexico, where it is said to impart an anise-like flavor to dishes. The leaves of drymifolia are apparently safe in the amounts one would normally use for cooking, but as far as I can determine, only that particular variety is safe and useful. Drymifolia is distinguished from the others by having fruits with thinner skins, and the leaves smell of anise even before being cooked. Plants being grown as houseplants from supermarket avocados are probably not drymifolia (at best they might be a hybrid of it), so I do not recommend trying to cook with the leaves of a plant you've started from seed. (Even if they aren't toxic, the flavor is not likely to be what you're looking for anyway.) Instead, I'd recommend that you track down a source to sell you a whole plant with a confirmed identity. The only such source P. drymifolia I found on-line was Rolling River Nursery, out of Northern California, but their website doesn't seem to be updated very often ("available spring 2007"), and I have no personal dealings with them at all so I don't know if they're a good place to buy stuff or not. Caveat emptor.
³ Specifically, that's "Rusty," a reconstruction of the giant ground sloth Megalonyx jeffersonii. Rusty lives (or "lives," rather) at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, where he is apparently one of the major draws. I mean, they have him on the t-shirts and everything:


In person, he's actually kind of terrifying. You maybe don't get this from the photo, but he's enormous -- maybe 8-9 feet (2.4-2.7 m) tall and at least as long. And there are claws, which didn't show up that well in the above photo, but here he is from another angle:


⁴ I'm sure it's just a coincidence that human beings are thought to have arrived in the Americas around 14,500 years ago.
⁵ Technically, the picture above is of a skeleton found in China, but it made the whoops-it's-extinct joke better so I used it. One North American species was Gomphotherium angustidens, which looks pretty darned elephanty with its skin on:

Public domain illustration, from Wikipedia.
As for the relationship between gomphotheres and elephants: the terminology is confusing, and nobody seems terribly inclined to spell the interrelationships out clearly. My understanding is that the order Proboscidea of mammals contains the family Elephantidae (modern elephants), and the extinct families Mammutidae (mastodons), Gomphotheriidae (gomphotheres) and possibly the Stegodontidae (no common name) if you're the kind of person who believes the Stegodontidae should be a separate family. (Not everyone believes this; it's controversial.) So they're . . . fairly related to elephants, and they look quite a bit like elephants, but they aren't technically elephants.
⁶ Coincidence! (It actually might have been: there was an ice age ending around 10,000 years ago. It really might not have been our fault. I would be really surprised if we hadn't found some way to make the situation worse for the gomphotheres, though, because it's what we do.)
⁷ The Nahuatl among others, probably; I have a less than comprehensive understanding of how many distinct groups of people have lived in southern Mexico and Central America during the last 15,000 years, or what most of them would have called Persea americana. You don't know either, so don't go judging me.
⁸ In fact, for quite a while, people assumed that since it resembled a testicle, it had to be good for fertility, and maybe also an aphrodisiac, because people are easily convinced to think about sex and collectively very suggestible. The avocado thus became associated with lewd and promiscuous behavior, to the point where the early commercial growers and marketers had to launch an aggressive PR campaign to convince everyone that it was possible to eat avocados without turning into a huge slut.
⁹ I actually wouldn't know: to the best of my recollection, I've never eaten an avocado. Which you'd think I'd eat one while I was working on the profile, just to be able to say I'd done it, but no. (The avocados in the house are all bought and consumed by the husband. Who has thus far not turned into a huge slut, just in case you had lingering doubts about that.)
¹⁰ Or maybe this would be a good moment in history to bring back the aphrodisiac rumors?
¹¹ I worry that maybe I'm tempting fate by saying so, but I haven't seen a mealybug or scale insect in here in a long time. And it's not like I stopped checking for them.
¹² I don't trust them to resprout. I'm getting better about doing it anyway, but it's still difficult for me.
¹³ (Also I think it's probably an incomplete list. I try to document, but I lose things sometimes. Sorry.)

[Exceptionally] Pretty pictures: transmitted light -- Part XXXIV

Five green pictures, five orange pictures.

As I write this, I have no idea how yesterday's election went, but the odds are that I was pleasantly surprised by something and unpleasantly surprised by something else. Since bad news always hits me harder than good, this means I'm probably in a bad mood today. I mean, I saw a "vote no on retention of activist judges" sign¹ yesterday in someone's yard while walking Sheba, and it ruined a good chunk of my late morning / early afternoon. And that was just one guy. So today is probably not a good day for me. Be gentle.

(The previous transmitted light posts can be found here.)

Persea americana. We started a couple avocado trees from seed during the winter, less because I had a burning desire to grow avocados than because the husband likes to eat them. One is doing pretty well; I'm having trouble communicating with the other. I pinch it, it grows back one replacement growing tip. I pinch that tip, and it grows one replacement. The first plant understood that it was supposed to branch; I'm not sure why the second one is having such a hard time with the idea.

Unknown Cirsium sp. I was more certain about IDing this as a Cirsium then than I am now.

Salvia elegans, dead(ish) leaf. Arguably closer to pink than to orange, but whatever. When I first put the Salvia elegans outside last spring, some of the leaves turned weird colors from the cold. This is one of those. Not really pretty, exactly, but it's something I didn't know this plant could do.

Solenostemon scutellarioides 'Rustic Orange.' Not especially pretty, but I think the irregular red spots on the underside of the leaf were odd enough to call your attention to.

Populus deltoides. Fairly similar to yesterday's Liriodendron tulipifera photo.

Ambrosia trifida. Probably the prettiest ragweed-related photo you're going to see all month. Lucky you!

Dracaena fragrans 'Massangeana.' Pretty much what you'd expect it to look like, I suppose. The main motivation for taking the picture was that this is a plant we cut back, and the newly-sprouting leaves, once they reached full-size again, looked very pretty.

Malus sp. My favorite from this batch. For some reason, I even kind of dig the blurry bits on the sides.

Zingiber malaysianum. The range of colors I get out of this plant continues to please me. I wish there were some way to do them all at once.

Heuchera 'Venus.' I prefer this to yesterday's Heuchera photo, though not by a lot. There are some very nice Heuchera varieties that are really plain by transmitted light; this isn't one of them.

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¹ (Translation for non-Iowans: "How dare the Iowa Supreme Court try to tell me f*gg*ts are people!")