Picture: Bryophyllum x houghtonii

My intended post on the possible ban on lead in ammunition and other hunting and fishing equipment, which I mentioned in passing on Monday, is turning out to require a lot more investigation than I had originally intended, partly because I really know very little about lead, ammunition, hunting and fishing. (I'm having a good time trying to learn stuff really fast, though.)

I'm still going to try to post it on Friday, and if not Friday then Sunday at the latest (for reasons which will be revealed in the post, I will be very disppointed if I can't post it by Sunday).


Meanwhile, here is a picture of Bryophyllum x houghtonii I took a couple weeks ago at the ex-job. (Originally identified as B. daigremontianum, but Lee, in comments, said the leaves were too narrow to be daigremontianum. I'm keeping the link to the B. daigremontianum profile, because it's still half correct -- houghtonii is B. daigremontianum x B. delagoense -- and the care is presumably interchangeable. It's quite possible that the plants I was talking about in the profile were also B. x houghtonii, since the ones at work all kinda looked like this, but we didn't see mature plants that often because we tried to pull them up, so the ID was sort of always shaky.)

Pictures: Petunia 'Phantom'

I took these photos in April, and by now everybody's already blogged about how they do or don't like them, and quite a few people don't approve of Petunias under any circumstances, so nobody's going to care about this post, but it's late on Saturday night and I don't have a post yet and this was the best I could do, so.


I think I have to come down on the side of not liking them. One of the churches in town planted some in a small bed, and from a distance, they don't read well. The black basically disappears, and all you're left with are five narrow slashes of pale yellow, which to my eye looks a lot like five chlorotic, withered leaves. (And sometimes the actual leaves are chlorotic and/or withered, which doesn't help.)


Not saying I couldn't maybe like them in a different context -- a yellow container? against a red wall? -- but so far I'm not impressed. The only thing I'd like less in a Petunia would be solid black, and I hear they have a pronounced tendency to revert to solid black.

Picture: Cyrtomium falcatum frond

We had an ice storm on Wednesday, which I'd been looking forward to, but then I spent the last several hours of Wednesday without the internet, which made it suck anyway. I'm having terrible luck with weather this year. The blizzard was not a particularly good storm, plus it led to the plant room panic, and now the ice storm (which was okay, not the best ice storm ever, but not terrible) knocks out the internet for several hours. It's as if bad weather can be inconvenient even when you don't go anywhere or do anything. How is that fair?

We also lost the telephone (We have a landline. The husband also has a cell, but it frightens and angers me in a caveman-encountering-fire kind of way, so I rarely use it.), which is a little scary -- suppose we'd been relying on just the landline, and needed to call 911? Is this a plot by the cell phone companies to slowly kill off all the people who rely solely on their landlines?

But anyway. Which all means that I spent most of yesterday catching up on the internet, and boy was there a lot to catch up on. Among other things, there's DRAMA! at Garden Web. And then also for some reason I spent a lot of time monitor-shopping (browser-shopping? What's the internet equivalent of window-shopping?) at Glasshouse Works, because the husband made me do my taxes (long story), so now I know I have money coming to me at some point and want to spend it. (There's nothing in particular at GHW that I have to have, but I am very intrigued by Dyckia velascana. As well as twenty or thirty other things. Though I will probably not buy all of them, and may not buy any of them.) And what I should have been doing during all that time was watering plants, because . . . on any given day, the odds are about 4 out of 5 that I should be watering plants at some point during it.

Anyway. All of the above is to explain to you why I don't have anything better to show you, post-wise, than just an unfurling Cyrtomium falcatum frond. Though it's a very nice frond. Probably better full-sized, by the way.


So we've got this today, we'll do a Nina picture tomorrow, and then I'll be back on track. I have a particularly weird Nina picture in mind. It should be a big hit with everybody.

Picture: Ladybug on Jade Cuttings

I am having a very bad day yesterday, and as a result, I respectfully request that readers supply their own commentary for this post.

(It's nothing to worry about. I'll likely be fine by the time you read this.)

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UPDATE: I in fact am fine. Disruptions in my sleep schedule are highly correlated to flare-ups of the ol' depression, and such a disruption happened yesterday morning.

Unfortunately, knowing that there is no rational basis for the way I'm feeling, and that it's all just a matter of me having gotten up too early, does absolutely nothing to blunt the unpleasantness. So I just have to ride it out for the 6-12 hours it lasts.

The good news is that my brain is extraordinarily predictable about the whole business, and there are certain subjects I only think about during these depressive episodes (Mostly prior employers and how badly we failed and disappointed one another, especially a job four jobs ago which I left in 2004 under traumatic and confusing circumstances.), which makes it much easier to identify what's going on and withdraw from the world until the storm has passed. Though experience is teaching me that I should be withdrawing much, much more thoroughly from Twitter when this is happening than I have so far been able to do. Something about how people are on Twitter really pushes my buttons sometimes.

Pictures: Lithops spp.

I function more or less just fine on days which are sunny, or partly cloudy, and I work just fine at night after the sun goes down, too, usually. But gray, cloudy days just completely kill any productive impulses I have.

And Friday and Saturday were both gray and rainy around here. I was trying to work on plant profiles, but got almost nowhere, and then around 5 PM I remembered that I didn't have a Sunday post ready yet. So here we are, and I apologize for it being sort of lame. Perhaps tomorrow's post will be better.

Though if you're into Lithops you may not think this is lame at all. In which case I apologize for the apology.

My favorite one is third from the top.

Picture: Acer sp. seedling

This would be a better picture with a different-colored background, but you blog with the maple seedling pictures you have, not the maple seedling pictures you wish you had.


I recognize that this is nothing amazing to most readers, and that this is basically a weed to a lot of people. But look! See how pretty the new little leaves are!

Picture: Pylon Family

Two things:

1) I always thought power line support pylons were kind of cool, in a big, man-shaped-robot-stomping-through-the-countryside sort of way. Others, including the husband as a child, found them scary. Coincidentally, this was also in a big, man-shaped-robot-stomping-through-the-countryside sort of way. I guess a lot of things depend on how one feels about large, man-shaped robots stomping through the countryside.

Anyway. So here, obviously, is a pylon family portrait.¹

Near Hills, IA. Open in separate window for a larger version.

2) Looking these up to confirm that they were sometimes called "pylons" (the Australians are more imaginative, according to Wikipedia, and call them "ironmen."²) reminded me that pesticides are not named any more sensibly than car models or celebrity babies. Of the eight restricted-use pesticides we regularly used at my former job, my favorite name by far was Pylon, AKA chlorfenapyr.³ It was my favorite brand name just because it made absolutely no sense: as far as I'm concerned, it makes about as much sense as naming a pesticide Handkerchief.⁴

Not that Pylon was my actual favorite pesticide to use and mix; it just had the most ridiculous name. My favorite pesticide to mix and use was Azatin (azadirachtin), for reasons I will leave mysterious and tantalizing, since I might want to write about my love of Azatin someday.

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¹ IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: This is not the same thing as a Cylon family portrait. Although both pylons and Cylons share humanoid form and common ancestry, they differ in a number of key traits, most notably size and mobility.
² Or perhaps they're less imaginative, given the overwhelming resemblance to men, and probable iron-based composition. I say let your feelings about Australians and/or Wikipedia be your guide.
³ Though I preferred to call it by its given name, 4-bromo-2-(4-chlorophenyl)-1-(ethoxymethyl)-5-(trifluoromethyl)-1H-pyrrole-3-carbonitrile.
⁴ In fact, Handkerchief would be a more sensible pesticide name than Pylon, if for no other reason than that handkerchiefs actually are sometimes utilized in the killing and disposing of bugs, and pylons, at least in my personal experience, never are.

Picture: new Haworthia

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a new plant on Saturday, which was tagged as Haworthia coarctata but was actually something different. (Point of interest: the sticker saying H. coarctata was on top of another sticker, which said Sempervivum arachnoides. So props to whoever tried to fix the tag, 'cause you at least got the genus right.)

After perusing the search results for "Haworthia" at davesgarden.com, I have located a picture of H. limifolia var. ubomboensis, which looks enough like my plant that I'm willing to say that's what I have (though other websites list plants by that name, or as H. ubomboensis, which do not resemble my plant, so it's still somewhat uncertain).

My plant:


I do hope that H. l. var. ubomboensis is the right ID, both because I do not want to have to continue searching, and because "ubomboensis" is a fun word to say in my head. Too bad it's not H. l. var. udabomboensisnoudabomboensis, which would have been even more fun to say.

Picture: Ants on a Centaurea bud

Didn't seem quite right to tag this as a "pretty picture." It's not especially pretty. But "unpretty picture" seemed harsher than necessary. So it's neither. Just a picture. (It is somewhat more attractive close-up, though: try opening in a new window for best effect.)


It would appear that maybe peonies are not the only flowers that enlist the aid of ants in opening their flower buds. Or maybe there's some other reason why they would be so interested in this particular bud. I don't know. Fairly certain there's an explanation somewhere.